^^^^^^^ CB: "the point is to change (the world) is in the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. The Second thesis is explicitly epistemological as Carrol puts it, and the 11th continues the same theme:
"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. "
And the First Thesis , being first, really makes Carrol's point. The whole point of the Theses on Feuerbach is to found _activist_ or practical materialism, when all previous materialism had _passive_ . were contemplative, rather than active. It considered people as passive objects receiving information rather than active subjects. Idealism had been "active or practical", but not in the "senuous" world..
I
"The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.
Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity. ""