Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (1804–72)

Ludwig Feuerbach, one of the critical Young Hegelian intellectuals of the nineteenth century, has become famous for his radical critique of religious belief. In Das Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity) (1841) he develops the idea that God does not exist in reality but as a human projection only, and that the Christian principles of love and solidarity should be applied directly to fellow humans rather than being regarded as an indirect reflection of God’s love. In religion, the believer ‘projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object of an object, another being than himself’. Religious orientation is an illusion and is unhealthy, as it deprives and alienates the believer from true autonomy, virtue and community, ‘for even love, in itself the deepest, truest emotion, becomes by means of religiousness merely ostensible, illusory, since religious love gives itself to man only for God’s sake, so that it is given only in appearance to man, but in reality to God’ (Feuerbach 1841: 44, 48). In Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future) (1843) he extends his criticism to all forms of metaphysics and religion: ‘True Dialectics is not the Monologue of the sole Thinker, rather the Dialogue between I and Thou’, he writes in paragraph 62 (1846–66 II: 345), criticizing in particular his former teacher Hegel. The philosophy of the future has to be both sensual and communal, equally based on theory and practice and among individuals. In an anonymous encyclopedia article (1847) he defines his position: ‘the principle from which Feuerbach derives everything and towards which he targets everything is "the human being on the ground and foundation of nature"’, a principle which ‘bases truth on sensuous experience and thus replaces previous particular and abstract philosophical and religious principles’ (1964– III: 331). Feuerbach’s sensualism and communalism had great influence on the young Karl Marx’s development of an anthropological humanism, and on his contemporaries in providing a cultural and moral system of reference for humanism outside of religious orientation and rationalistic psychology. In the twentieth century, Feuerbach influenced existential theology (Martin Buber, Karl Barth) as well as existentialist and phenomenological thought.

1 Philosophy of the I and the Thou

Born in Landshut, son of the legal scholar and Bavarian diplomat Anselm von Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach studied theology with Karl Daub in Heidelberg and philosophy with Hegel in Berlin. He became lecturer in philosophy at the Bavarian university of Erlangen in 1829, but retired into private life after his marriage in 1837. His later years were without much communication and social activities; he died a poor and sick man in Rechenberg, near Nuremberg.

The interaction between the individual and the worlds of facts and thought, and the interrelatedness of individuals, were the central topics in Feuerbach’s thinking. His dissertation De infinitate, unitate atque communitate rationis (On the Infinity, Unity and Universality of Reason) (1828) concerns the relationship between the individual and the general, the subjective and the objective; here his answer is that panlogic rationality is the universal individual as well as the general mode of essence and existence. Two years later he published his fiercest critique of Christian belief in immortality and eternal life after death in Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (Thoughts on Death and Immortality) (1830). Here he holds that the mystical experience of sensual love and interpersonal community has infinity and eternity in itself, and that the neglect of this world and its riches in favour of the anticipated eternal world to come causes unhappiness and great discontent. Both studies mark two different attempts at a non-religious, humanistic transformation of traditional mystical insights concerning the unity of object and subject into, first, panlogical rationalism and, second, sensualistic realism. The publication of the critique of immortality, even though it appeared anonymously, made it impossible for Feuerbach to get a permanent salaried position as professor of philosophy in Christian Bavaria; he quit his teaching post after nine years of only moderately successful academic teaching at the University of Erlangen.

Feuerbach’s existentialist concept of philosophy is explicated in Abelard and Heloise (1834) and Pierre Bayle (1838), as well as in his selected studies on Spinoza and Leibniz. In Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of Future) (1843) he asserts that the philosophy of the future is ‘the complete, coherent, and absolute resolution of theology into anthropology’, into the ‘unity of the I and the Thou’: ‘The essence of man is contained only in community, in the unity of man with man – a unity which however is founded only in the reality of the differences between I and Thou’. Thus, the new philosophy ‘replaces religion… contains the essence of religion… truly is religion’. Epistemologically, reality resides in human rational and sensuous perception, in the rational, sensuous and passionate nature of man; ‘Truth, reality, and sensation are identical. Only the sensuous being is a true and real being’ (Feuerbach 1846–66 II: 344, 346). In critically reconstructing the history of religious systems of reference, Feuerbach finds in references to God the believers’ complex reference to themselves. Thus his method of critical reconstruction of previous systems of reference and self-reference reveals, as Wartofsky (1977) observes, a mode of self-revelation and self-articulation which represents the essential pattern of human consciousness and self-understanding, a consequent application of the existentialist interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Feuerbach’s anthropological interpretation: ‘the true critique lies in the development itself’.

This unorthodox approach to traditional metaphysics and anthropology influenced twentieth-century theologians and philosophers such as Martin Buber, Karl Barth, Karl Loewith, Henri Arvon and Louis Althusser. Feuerbach’s influence on the young Marx also played an important role in the post-Leninist interpretation of the humanism of the young Marx as an alternative to Marxism-Leninism and Stalinist interpretation of political economy.

In his last period in Über Spiritualismus und Materialismus (On Spiritualism and Materialism) (1866) Feuerbach developed an eudaimonistic and utilitarian ethics on the basis of the I–Thou anthropology, and a critique of perverted forms of seeking happiness and community in religion: ‘Good is the acceptance, bad the rejection of the drive to happiness. Happiness, but not reduced into one single person, rather disseminated among different persons, I and Thou integrating, therefore not one-sided but dual-sided and all-sided, is the principle of morality’. Sexual happiness is his paradigm for ‘the human drive to happiness, which can only be fulfilled in and through the happiness of the other’ (Feuerbach 1846–66 X: 62). The individual moral conscience thus works on the basis of reciprocity in assessing moral norms and attitudes: ‘The conscience is nothing else than the I which looks at things from the perspective of the vulnerable Thou, nothing else than the proxy for the happiness of the other on the basis and on the calling of one’s own happiness’ (Feuerbach 1846–66 X: 65).

2 Critique of religion

Feuerbach’s humanist approach prevented his philosophy of religion from merely rejecting religion as unrealistic and unfounded. On the contrary, he believed that religion contains the dreams and visions of individuals and cultures in an indirect way, a human product of self-transcending and visualizing oneself and humanity in ideal terms, not a divine inspiration: religion is the ‘knowledge of the infinite, it is therefore and can be nothing else than the consciousness which man has of his own – not finite and limited – but infinite nature’ (Feuerbach 1846–66 VII: 26). Feuerbach therefore rejects the notion that he is a promoter of atheism; he calls himself ‘a natural philosopher in the domain of the mind’, an ‘anthropocentric’ thinker: ‘the mystery of theology is anthropology, that of the divine being the human being’ (Feuerbach 1846–66 V: xiv–xv). This was exactly the interpretation of religion used by Hegel to interpret Greek and Roman mythology and religion as centred around the human world and simply transposing human characters, virtues and vices into the gods and goddesses. While Hegel’s main interest in the philosophy of religion was dialectically and speculatively to harmonize Christian tradition with speculative idealism, for Feuerbach all religious references are models of ‘alienation’ of man from himself, as God is nothing else but the artificially created outside nature of man’s own inside nature (see Alienation §2). Feuerbach rejects religion to the extent that it separates God and humans, and deprives humans of their best by making them a part of the divine; but he accepts religion to the extent that it recognizes divine powers and challenges which are genuinely human.

Feuerbach originally intended to entitle Das Wesen des Christentums (Essence of Christianity) (1841) as ‘Critique of Pure Unreason’ in order to set it alongside Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; and indeed the composition of his book mirrors that of Kant. Its first part characterizes religion as a human product and its positive content (that is, the ‘true and anthropological essence of religion’ which understands God as ‘love’ in the New Testament or as ‘a moral being or law’ in the Old Testament), just as Kant in the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason develops the positive capacities of epistemology in his transcendental analytics and aesthetics. The second part deconstructs religious speculation and metaphysics as being unrealistic and inhuman (that is, ‘the false or theological essence of religion’), just as Kant destroys the arguments for metaphysics and the existence of God independently of human projection and existence (see Kant, I. §8). Thus, in making Christian monotheism his predominant object of critique, he presents an anthropological reduction of what in Hegel’s interpretation still had the form of speculative transcendentalism. The human being is not a bearer of reason, subordinated to as well as participating in the ‘idea’, but a natural being existing in relationship with others. The revised second edition (1843) moves away from the dominance of the ‘species being’ model of human religious projection and alienation, which was still strongly influenced by Hegel, towards a more naturalistic sensualistic approach under the influence of reading Luther.

Later, in a short essay on the nature of religion, Das Wesen der Religion (Essence of Religion) (1845), Feuerbach additionally identifies angst and fear of unknown natural elements as the prime sources of religious projection. This generalizes his earlier theory into the explanation of religion as a response to social as well as natural environmental challenges based in feelings of dependence of and exposure to nature: ‘man’s original dependence and the feelings of dependency relates to nothing else than nature’; therefore, ‘"spirit" is nothing other than a general term to name essences, things, utensils which man is confronted with and which are different to his own products, he also uses the collective term "nature"’ (Feuerbach 1964– X: 4).

In his widely read Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion (Lectures on the Essence of Religion) (1851), originally delivered publicly in the revolutionary year 1848 on the invitation of students and citizens of Heidelberg, Feuerbach describes the cultural and social implications and consequences of religion and belief. Here, as in the Essence of Religion, the true object of religion and religious self-articulation or alienation is not primarily the individual and the social environment, but nature all-encompassing, the sum of powers and forces on which the individual feels absolutely dependent while simultaneously seeking freedom and self-determination.

His final exercise in promoting the thesis that ‘man created God’ is the voluminous book Der Ursprung der Götter nach den Quellen des classischen, hebräischen und christlichen Altertums (Theogony following the Sources of the Classical, Hebrew, and Christian Past), written between 1852 and 1857, with an even greater arsenal of quotes and references from a broad variety of religious literature. Different forms of religion demonstrate different attitudes of humans towards themselves and towards nature. While polytheism expresses the subordination of man under a multitude of external powers in nature, monotheism suppresses those many forces and powers in nature under one single rule or ruler, indirectly under man, who has created this divine supreme power after his own human image.

It is this analytical and educational drive to ‘transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of this world’ and the I-and-Thou which became instrumental in shaping modern existentialist theology, both Jewish (Martin Buber) and Protestant (Karl Barth). Despite being religious believers, Buber and Barth were nevertheless struck by Feuerbach’s suggestion that all previous forms of theology and dogmatics, including Hegel’s philosophy of religion, were nothing other than ‘esoteric psychology’, and they themselves became critics of religious fundamentalism. Most of Feuerbach’s theological critics agree that the importance of religion as a mode of reference to oneself, to others and to the social and natural world rarely has been grasped as comprehensively as it was by Feuerbach.

3 Individual emancipation versus political revolution

Feuerbach refused to accompany Marx, Ruge and other political revolutionaries and liberals into the course of direct political argumentation and action. He held that the time was not yet right for a political revolution because individual emancipation and the development of a culture of self-determination had not run its course in Germany. Therefore he chose the emancipatory and educative approach, analysing and criticizing traditional models of orientation in religion, philosophy and ideology in order to promote political change by promoting self-understanding and self-determination based on the principles of enlightenment. Contrasting his method to that of socialist political action, he compares his philosophical methodology to the methods of medical diagnosis, prognosis and therapy: ‘I have, determined by internal and external factors, decided to assess the diseases of the head and of the heart of mankind’.

Feuerbach’s belief that the grounds for a true revolution lay in the liberation of human sensuousness and feeling in interpersonal relations, not primarily in the externalities of political life, had an enormous influence on the more radical former disciples of Hegel, the Young Hegelians Bruno Bauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Max Stirner. Instead of becoming a member of the 1848 revolutionary parliament in Frankfurt, he chose to lecture publicly in Heidelberg where he declared religion to be closely related to politics, emphasizing that his lectures were focused on practical rather than theoretical politics. He maintained that ‘individualism in practical consequence is socialism, but not in the sense of French individualism’; for him ‘the dissolution of theology into anthropology in the realm of thinking is the dissolution of the monarchy into the republic in the realm of practice, of life…. Imagination is the power of religion and imagination is the power of the monarchy. Only so long will monarchs rule over humans as humans will be ruled by imagination. Despots rule only where phantasies rule’ (Feuerbach 1846–66 VIII: 460). It has been stressed in the literature (Arvon 1964; Cabada 1975; Kamenka 1970; Sass 1972) that Feuerbach is not merely a transitional figure towards Marx and Marxism-Leninism, but an alternative to the concept of political revolution and party elites.

Thus Feuerbach gave his own meaning to the term ‘communist’, in direct opposition to that employed by Marx and the socialist movement, when answering Max Stirner’s question ‘where does Feuerbach stand?’: ‘neither a materialist, nor an idealist, nor an identity philosopher is Feuerbach. So, what is he? He is in thought what he is in his deeds, in spirit what he is in flesh, in essence what he is in his senses – human being [mensch]; for Feuerbach only sees the essence of man in community: communal being, communist’ (Feuerbach 1846–66 V: 359).

In his Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future) (1843) Feuerbach uses the image of the ellipse having two focal points, as compared to the circle having only one centre, to compare the purely intellectual philosophy of Hegel and other schools of rationalism and metaphysics with his own approach of ‘head and heart’, rationality and sensuality, as the two commanding principles for theory and practice (Feuerbach 1846–66 II: 344). Marx took this image of the two centres of the ellipse from Feuerbach in 1844 in order to identify philosophy and proletariat as ‘head and heart’ of the emancipatorial process of history, this time in terms of political revolution, not educational and critical evolutionary emancipation as Feuerbach had done.