KATHRYN M.TOMASEK FEUERBACH, LUDWIG (1804–72)

KATHRYN M.TOMASEK FEUERBACH, LUDWIG (1804–72)

Ludwig Feuerbach is often seen as a mere precursor of Marx and Engels (see MARX AND MARXISM), and as the purveyor of the aphorism ‘man is what he eats’, a pun in German—‘der Mensch ist, was er isst’—which had not even been invented by him. Whilst it is true that his critique of Hegel’s idealistic-metaphysical system (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM) is one of the major elements of the groundwork on which Marxism is based, he is more than just a transitional figure between Hegel and Marx. From 1839 onwards Feuerbach became one of Hegel’s foremost critics amongst the Young Hegelians (Left Hegelians). He vigorously attacked Hegel’s ‘theological idealism’ and proclaimed an empiricist, senses-based, materialism that rejects God or any other idealistic, metaphysical projection. His critique of religion hit the theological-

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philosophical community of the 1840s ‘like a thunderbolt’: this was the assessment of his fellow Young Hegelian DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS whose Life of Jesus had shaken the foundations of theology in the preceding decade. Feuerbach’s importance lies equally in the development of a philosophical anthropology and in the investigation into the psychological aspects of the genesis of religion. In this regard he has had a great influence on the existentialist movement, on thinkers such as Martin Buber and on twentieth-century theologians such as Bultmann or Karl Barth.

Feuerbach, son of a jurist who had achieved fame through the reform of criminal law in Bavaria, first studied theology before going to Berlin to continue with philosophical studies under Hegel. His early work of 1830, Thoughts on Death and Immortality (Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, ed. and trans. J.A.Massey, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), was an irreverent assault on theology and ruined his prospects of an academic career, forcing him to lead a rather frugal life as a private writer that was only affordable due to his wife’s financial assets. Although initially an ardent admirer of Hegel, he soon broke with the latter’s metaphysical idealism. Feuerbach’s critique of religion and notion of materialism were developed in a series of works, starting with his Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie, published in 1839 in the Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, which marked his break with Hegel. His most famous work was to become The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841, trans. 1843), a critique of religion that was elaborated upon in subsequent works such as Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, 1843, trans. 1966), Das Wesen der Religion (The Essence of Religion, published 1846 in Die Epigoneri), Lectures on the Essence of Religion (Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, 1851, trans. 1967) and Theogenie (1857), an encompassing survey of the ‘genesis of gods’, the genesis of religious thinking in Ancient Greece and Rome, Judaism and Christianity. In his last major study, Das Geheimnis des Opfers oder der Mensch ist was er isst (The Mystery of Sacrifice or Man is What He Eats, 1862), Feuerbach stressed the common materiality of man and nature.

Feuerbach was thrilled by the French Revolution of 1848 but seemed to be less enthusiastic about the German. Although he was the idol of the revolutionary students who asked him in 1848/9 to hold public lectures in Heidelberg’s town hall—later-on published as Lectures on the Essence of Religion—he himself was, from the very beginning, deeply sceptical about the political maturity of the Germans and thus about the chances of a successful democratic revolution; that is why he did not even bother trying to get elected into the German revolutionary Paulskirche parliament in Frankfurt In one of his Lectures he pointed out that he did not give a damn for political liberty if man still stayed a slave of religious illusions, and he stressed that true freedom was only where man was also free from religion. Still, he was favourably inclined to Marx’s Kapital, and

2 years before his death he joined the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party.

What is the origin of religion? There is no doubt for Feuerbach that religion is nothing but illusion. His conception of sensuous materialism, according to which man can only gain experience and knowledge from sense perception, leaves no room for a senses-based experience of God. He does not deny the existence of a historical Jesus who became the trigger for the Christian religion, but he does deny that this Jesus was a Christ, a God or Son of God, born of a virgin and working miracles: to him, this Jesus Christ is nothing but a fantasy. In the Essence of Christianity Feuerbach explores the relationship between

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man and this Christian idea of God. Man projects his qualities that in him are limited into infinity and objectifies them, giving them an independent divine existence. But there is no external reality to God; the most real being, the ens realissimum, is man’s essence. Feuerbach characterizes the true relationship between God and man as follows: ‘Man is the God of man. That man exists at all he has to thank nature, that he is man he has to thank man.’ God is nothing but hypostatised, i.e. ‘essential man’: in a complete reversal of the biblical message, it has always been man creating God in order to overcome his finitude and find child-like comfort and reassurance. God’s infinity is in reality the infinity of the capacity or potentiality of the human species, of ‘generic man’, as opposed to the finitude of the human individual. In the same vein, Christ is in reality nothing but the consciousness of species unity: whoever loves man for the sake of man, who rises to the universal love adequate to the nature of the species, is a Christian, is Christ himself. In the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, God as the ‘epitome of all realities or perfections’ is defined as ‘nothing other than a compendious summary devised for the benefit of the limited individual, an epitome of the generic human qualities distributed among men in the self-realisation of the species in the course of world history.’ God is reduced to man; eliminating God means realizing man’s potential and thus concretizing man: but it is important to stress that Feuerbach is not speaking about individual but ‘generic’ man. Distinguishing in the Essence of Christianity between the ‘true or anthropological essence of religion’ and the ‘false or theological essence of religion’, Feuerbach does not denigrate religion as such; he just reinterprets religion as an ontological concept, as a discourse that in truth is not about—a non-existent—God but about man. The language of religion—although meaningless with regard to the external reality of its object—still gives an insight into man’s inner being and thus makes sense if reinterpreted as a discourse about man. The Essence of Religion, his brochure of 1846, and the subsequent Lectures on the Essence of Religion, elaborate on the same topic, but they bring in an additional point of view: they stress the genesis of religion out of man’s attempt at overcoming his fear of nature upon which he totally depends, at trying to tame it by making it into God(s). In the Lectures he succinctly summarizes his world-view in two words: ‘nature’ and ‘man’. These two terms also constitute the epistemological condition for the dialectic process of man getting to know himself. Man needs both nature and fellow man as the ‘other’, as the Thou that man’s I has to refer to as way of coming to terms with the world and gaining self-knowledge.

The ‘essence of man’ exists not on its own but only in community, as Feuerbach stresses in §§ 59, 60 and 63 of the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: ‘The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man’; ‘solitude is finiteness and limitation; community is freedom and infinity. Man for himself is man (in the ordinary sense); man with man—the unity of I and Thou—is God’; ‘the secret of the Trinity is the secret of communal and social life’.

How does Feuerbach see the role of theology and philosophy respectively? The very conditions of human life, the biological needs of individual and species survival—water, air, food and sex—as well as the psychological needs for law, creativity, love and hope are expressed in religious terms brought about by sensuous imagination that objectifies and projects them onto a God. Theology turns these forms, by means of abstraction, into an esoteric, otherworldly edifice of thought evolving around a personalized God;

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philosophy, on the other hand, abstracts them once again, casting them in a fully abstract form of metaphysical discourse, in a sort of ‘abstract theology’ using terms such as Essential Being or Absolute Spirit. Both theology and metaphysical-speculative philosophy are means of man’s quest for self-knowledge, so the very essence of theology and philosophy is anthropology. Only the science of anthropology is doing justice to a genuine understanding of man, thus overcoming man’s alienation of himself. So man’s image of God is his ideal image of man as a universalized social, as a species being; the God of the theologians and the Being or Absolute Spirit of the metaphysicians are nothing but the human consciousness of its own nature. In the beginning, there is man with religion as illusion, as self-deception that forms part of a historically necessary!— dialectic that brings about a process of self-revelation and results in man becoming fully conscious of himself. Feuerbach reduces God to man whilst not denying the role of the ‘religious’ in mankind’s quest for self-knowledge. In this process truth is neither materialism nor idealism, neither physiology nor psychology; truth is only anthropology: transcending the dualism of body and soul, Feuerbach affirms the totality of mind-body identity. Man consists of head and heart and stomach; feeling, willing and thinking constitute man’s consciousness, as his essential nature.

One of the key terms of Feuerbach’s philosophy is ‘alienation’. Since Feuerbach sticks to the premise that man remains determined by nature, it is not the transformation of nature and society, not man’s activism that constitutes an end to his alienation. Alienation in Hegel’s system is the theory that man whose true nature is divine falls short of the divine in his actual existence: to the extent that man has not realized himself as divine he is estranged from his true, authentic self. To Feuerbach, alienation has a diametrically opposed meaning: man’s condition of alienation is caused by his projecting part of his being onto another—imaginary—being and thus becoming estranged from his complete being; God as a fantasy is thus the cause of man’s alienation. Man’s liberation lies in an inward reorientation in his consciousness, in abandoning his illusions of the exterior reality of any God or abstract notions of Being, Logos or Absolute Spirit—only through turning to man and to man alone man becomes fully ‘real’ and truly free. This does not mean, however, that Feuerbach condones a resigned attitude of man vis-à-vis his environment. Activity is called for, but in his eyes it is not a conditio sine qua non for the ending of man’s alienation, as posited by Marx and Engels. Feuerbach clearly sees the ill effects of religion in practical life and castigates religion as an obstacle to man’s material improvement; he identifies religion as a reactionary form that protects the status quo due to its negating the value of earthly life and shifting man’s hopes and aspirations from this life to an illusionary after-life. How much Feuerbach valued the importance of earthly conditions for man is most famously encapsulated in the dictum ‘man is what he eats’; he would conclude that if life is the precondition of thought and food the precondition of life, then food is the precondition of thought: ‘primum vivere, deinde philosophari’— first, to live, then to think or philosophize. So, if one wants to better people they should

be given better food. But this demand stays on a philosophical level, not tackling the active side of this notion—which Marx would make to one of the centrepieces of his programme when explicitly criticizing Feuerbach on this very point in his Theses on Feuerbach, written in 1845: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ Feuerbach was criticized by Marx and Engels for inconsistent materialism. Marx praised him for having proven that philosophy was

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nothing else but religion expounded by thought, i.e. another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man. But Marx and Engels go beyond Feuerbach by demanding the removal of the social conditions that made man create God and religion in the first place, transforming thus the critique of religion into a critique of economics and politics, the only level they deem appropriate for man’s alienation to be overcome by means of turning individual man into an active, revolutionary agent with the aim of becoming fully ‘concretized’, fully ‘real’. To Feuerbach, outer change can only be effected from within. He strongly opposes the effect of religion leading man to expect salvation and happiness only in Heaven and to accept and reconcile himself to his suffering from poverty and injustice on earth. In this sense religion is regarded as counter-productive to the emancipation and liberation of the huge class of the under- privileged, impeding their struggle to better their lot and get their due, thus perpetuating the dominance of the privileged classes. The only solution, in the eyes of Feuerbach, is for the underprivileged class to reject God and become atheistic. Only by doing so, by effecting inner change first, their alienation can be overcome on all levels, including the socio-economic one.

Was Feuerbach truly a-theistic? In his work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy Engels enthusiastically praised Feuerbach for his materialistic view that nothing existed outside nature and man, and that the higher beings our religious fantasies had created were only the fantastic reflection of our own wishes, our own essence; to Engels, the liberating effect of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity in the sense of breaking the spell of Hegel’s idealistic system was such that it made him and other Young Hegelians at once into Feuerbachians. On the other hand, Engels commented on Feuerbach as being in his lower half a materialist but in his upper half an idealist. It could be argued that in Feuerbach’s thinking God comes back through the backdoor of humanism, in the form of a humanist religion. ‘The purpose of my writing,’ says Feuerbach in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion:

is to convert people from theology to anthropology, from love of god(s) to love of their fellow human beings, from being candidates for life after death to being students of this life; to free them from religious and political servitude to heavenly or earthly monarchies and aristocracies; to make them into self-confident citizens of the Earth.

Radical twentieth-century theologians also departed from such an anthropological stance in their reevaluation of religion, endorsing Feuerbach’s statement of ‘homini homine nihil pulchrius’ —nothing is more beautiful to man than man. By identifying God with the ‘essence of man’ God is simultaneously dethroned and reinstated as an evolving ‘human species being’; the reduction of God to man means the death of God to individual man, but does it really negate God as far as ‘generic man’ is concerned? Isn’t the ‘essence of man’ a religious concept? Not to mention the problems that arise in connection with this concept if one considers the notion of ‘evil’!

Feuerbach wants to make God human, but he does not really escape God. Even if he kills off God as God, he connects man with the divine. Replacing the love of God through the love of man is characterized as the ‘only true religion’ in the sense that it is the only

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link from man to man which makes man truly human. Feuerbach’s philosophy is a critique of religion and philosophy as well as a humanist religion.

At the very end of his Lectures he reiterates his goal of turning men to ‘full men’ rather than keeping them in a state of ‘half animal, half angel’ as viewed by the Christians. Before deciding on the final title of Essence of Christianity Feuerbach had thought of entitling it with the Greek Know Thyself—his philosophy is indeed a reflection of man’s self-discovery, providing us to this very day with lots of ‘food for thought’ about the being of man and his raison d’être on this earth.