In Theses on Feuerbach, Marx criticizes the fact that Feuerbach did not go far enough in analyzing the experience of estrangement between mental and physical human experience. He criticizes the concept of "an abstract--isolated--human individual," which is divided between consciousness and material reality. But it is not enough to criticize religious abstraction by asserting that secular abstraction is really the essence of man. The abstraction is the problem: The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual . . . [but] the ensemble of the social relations" (Marx, Theses, p. 2).

Secular idealism, like religion, is preoccupied with what is intangible, ideal, or immaterial, which is somehow meant to be more real than material reality. It is another way of drawing a distinction between (1) a theoretical idea, which can be talked about and thought about but which cannot b

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 [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality of non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question (Marx, Theses, p. 3)

e touched because it will always be intangible, and (2) a practical, tangible, applied reality, which can be talked and thought about and in addition touched and directly experienced. In Marx's view, only what is tangible about experience is really worth talking or thinking about, and that would be the material conditions in which experience unfolds. That is in the background of this reference to objective truth:

Giddens, A. (1971). Capitalism and modern social theo4y; An analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.