 If philosophical thought is to avoid remaining “a prisoner of the ego”, Feuerbach insists, it “must begin with its antithesis, with its alter ego” (AP 146/138). The antithesis of thought is sensation. Whereas in thinking it is the object that is determined by the thinking activity of the subject, in sense experience, he maintains, without much argument and with apparently little concern for the epistemological problems that preoccupied the British empiricists and Kant, the consciousness of the subject is determined by the activity of the object, which functions thus as a subject in its own right. What makes it possible for the ego to posit the object is only that, in positing the object as something distinct from itself, the ego is at the same time posited by the object. If, however, the 