RadixJournal - June 08, 2026


Karl Marx： On the Jewish Question (1843)

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Kant Feuerbach Marx Willie Brown Hegelianism
Man vs. Civilization Monogamy and Modernity

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

129.94

Word count

1,046

Sentence count

52

Harmful content

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about the concept of God, and how it relates to the ideas of Kant, Feuerbach, and Marx. I also talk about how God can be understood in terms of a rational ideal of morality that is actually possessed by us all.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I, I think there was even a line in Inherit the Wind, which I read in high school.
00:00:06.080 I, I, I, at some point in American history, that was the play that you read sophomore or junior year.
00:00:14.500 I don't know if that's still the case. 0.96
00:00:15.880 Some zoomers can correct me, but it's a good play about the so-called monkey trial in the 1920s. 0.93
00:00:21.560 And there's one line, I think with, you know, where William Jennings Bryant or whatever his name is in the play, 0.97
00:00:29.640 because they changed the names up
00:00:31.580 is, you know, he doesn't think
00:00:33.820 that God created
00:00:35.720 man. He says that man
00:00:37.560 created God. You know, how
00:00:39.500 terrible could this be?
00:00:42.840 So
00:00:43.160 Feuerbach is saying
00:00:45.640 that, basically, but
00:00:47.580 he's saying it in a very
00:00:49.820 deep and complicated
00:00:51.900 way. And so
00:00:53.560 all of these young Hegelians 1.00
00:00:55.760 are coming from 0.91
00:00:57.060 Kant on some
00:00:59.060 basic level and Kant in in critiquing reason he's sort of trying to get at what exactly
00:01:11.340 it is that you can perceive through your senses and you can see an object that chair
00:01:22.120 right in front of me. Or maybe if there were a person in this room, that man standing right
00:01:28.800 there. But you can't really understand a thing in itself. You can't ever know another person
00:01:37.220 fully. You are limited by your perception to see a sort of apparent thing, so to speak,
00:01:46.580 and not the thing in itself.
00:01:49.580 Now, maybe what I just said sounds like gobbledygook.
00:01:53.240 I don't think it sounds like gobbledygook,
00:01:54.600 but maybe it sounds obvious or something.
00:01:58.020 But this actually, this sort of limiting
00:02:01.160 of what is possible with perception,
00:02:04.380 grounding what we can know in perception,
00:02:07.200 it is very profound.
00:02:09.520 God is not in the world.
00:02:12.780 You can't, there are no miracles in the for Kant.
00:02:16.580 um this is extremely important in fact uh now god does exist for con cont was a um a protestant
00:02:28.840 apparently a loyal protestant he was his books were at least the first critique was banned
00:02:35.000 by the catholic church or censored i should say but um he was still devout but god in the sense
00:02:45.180 becomes a sort of fulfillment of an idealistic yearning for truth and morality. One that you
00:02:55.020 can never prove, one that the real world will never prove to be true. And so what Feuerbach
00:03:06.260 here is saying is, and again, I'm trying to paint in broad strokes and sum these things up.
00:03:12.180 it's yes God did not create man man created God but in the in the way that we created God
00:03:21.600 we sort of gave him all our treasures we confessed all our secrets so God is an embodiment
00:03:31.540 of maybe, if I go super Kantian here,
00:03:36.300 a rational ideal of morality
00:03:40.340 that is actually possessed by us all.
00:03:43.800 Now, Kant had a notion of a moral imperative
00:03:50.520 that was basically the golden rule
00:03:54.280 that is due unto others
00:03:55.600 as you would have them do unto you,
00:03:57.960 which we all learned in kindergarten.
00:03:59.400 in uh it's a slightly different it's basically you should act in a way that you would will
00:04:06.020 the universalization of that act uh for you know it's close enough for government work it's all
00:04:13.360 it's the golden rule basically so Kant again in in this sort of like radical limiting of human
00:04:21.040 perception, radical demystification of the world, demagification, we want to use that
00:04:32.680 word, disenchantment, that would be the better word, disenchantment of the world that he
00:04:38.280 undoubtedly was engaged in.
00:04:41.180 He is an enlightened modernist person, no question about it, someone who could be used
00:04:48.040 to justify scientific exploration and so on.
00:04:52.200 In this disenchantment of the world, he sort of places God as an ideal, but it is an ideal
00:04:59.880 that is true, that comes from within.
00:05:03.780 And so this notion of man-made God for Feuerbach is actually a profound notion.
00:05:10.780 You know, the fact that we worship a moral God sort of shows how moral we are.
00:05:18.040 You could also take this in sort of another way. There was one ancient historian, I'm forgetting his name at the moment, but he basically said, lo and behold, the Ethiopians, their gods are black and have woolly hair, and for the Europeans, our gods are white and have blue eyes, and gods in China have yellow skin.
00:05:41.440 And, you know, wow, who would have thought it?
00:05:43.840 That's a sort of basic kind of racial conception of your God is an ideal that is basically you.
00:05:53.800 Feuerbach is taking this on another level, basically saying that your moral God that you imagine.
00:06:01.780 So this is a very modern post-Enlightenment concept of God.
00:06:05.940 This God is not Yahweh, who is far from moral, is actually terrifying.
00:06:10.220 This God is some abstract, platonic thing that people believed in in the 19th century.
00:06:19.960 But again, that sort of reveals how moral you are, or it reveals the truth of morality.
00:06:26.220 Now, again, I mentioned that Marx is sort of turning young Hegelianism on its head.
00:06:32.100 What Marx is going to say is that that God is sort of like the secret confession, the inner unspoken ideals of the economic and technological substrate.
00:06:48.540 So your God in the ancient world is going to justify slavery.
00:06:54.060 Your God in the modern world is going to justify capitalism.
00:06:57.580 him. And he didn't say this exactly, but I'm just extrapolating here. Who knows? Maybe your God in
00:07:06.580 the age of communism will justify communism, but he's coming from you. You are not coming from him
00:07:14.360 is the thing that they have in common. And just on a basic level, I do think that this is true.
00:07:23.720 I mean, look, you can absolutely use ancient religion to justify slavery. 0.91
00:07:30.680 You can use the Bible to justify slavery, despite its sort of Dionysian liberationist impulses that are definitely in there.
00:07:41.820 There's no doubt that you can find plenty of passages.
00:07:44.560 I mean, after all, at least according to Jesus, not necessarily the Hebrew Bible, but your best life is not now. 0.62
00:07:52.000 this is a veil of tears that we live in right now it's it's afterwards so if you're a slave now well
00:07:56.800 then the breaks but you're you're the same as your master because you'll both be up in heaven one day