Ludwig Feuerbach

https://www.workersliberty.org/files/ludwigfeuerbach.pdf

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) sat through Hegel's summer semester lectures of 1824 in Logic and Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Religion and this experience, he wrote later, became the turning point of his life.

The publication in 1841 of The Essence of Christianity established him in the minds of his contemporaries as an intellectual leader of the Left Hegelians. He had, to paraphrase the words of Engels, “exploded the [Hegelian] System and broken its spell.” The book is still regarded as the precursor of all projection theories of religion [i.e. theories of religion as a projection onto imaginary beings, gods, etc. of conflicts in real human life].

Feuerbach then wrote two philosophical manifestos,Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy (1842) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843). The manifestoes were filled with bold and radical ideas but Feuerbach never systematically developed them. In 1848 and at the height of his influence, he became enthusiastic about the revolutions in France and its inevitable impact on Europe... [But by 1860] in poverty and forced to move to Rechenberg near Nürnberg, he was financially supported by friends and by donations from the Social Democratic Workers' Party (of which he had become a member).

By the end of his career in 1871, he regarded himself as an atheist, materialist, and communist. The difficulty with Hegel's philosophy, Feuerbach argued, is that everything in nature and history is seen from the standpoint of development and in such a way that the last stage of this development is regarded as a totality that includes in itself all the previous stages. The result is a not only a complete misrepresentation of nature but of culture and religion, because it ignores all their variety and particularities.

It is in this way, for example, that Christianity is determined as the Absolute religion. The same error is made in philosophy. Hegel's own philosophy is exempt from the assumption that governs the treatment of others; namely, as the perspective of one philosopher whose problems are cast up by his immediate predecessors and, hence, has its own presuppositions and problems. Rather, Hegel, by virtue his claim of beginning only with the structure of Reason itself as manifested in his Logic, regards himself as the “speculative Dalai Lama,” the incarnation of Geist itself. But just as Strauss has shown that there can be no incarnation in history so there can be no perfect manifestation of the universal in one philosophy. Indeed, “incarnation and history are absolutely incompatible”.

Another difficulty inherent in Hegel's philosophy is that because his Logic is thought both to describe the structures of reality itself as well as to govern the dialectical form which the philosopher uses to explicate it, Hegel confuses the demonstration of his ideas with the substance of philosophy.

Then there is Hegel's unremitting concern with abstractions which ignore the concreteness of sensuous reality.

All these problems in Hegel, Feuerbach concluded, are rooted in his assumption of Absolute identity, an assumption which is beyond criticism and which he had made from the very beginnings of his philosophical career. Idealism is committed to the unity of subject and object, spirit and nature, thought and being. And the way idealists handle the problem of the objectivity of nature is to appeal to an Absolute subject in which the predicates “nature” and “spirit” are simply attributes of the same thing, the Absolute.

Hegelian philosophy is really a “rational mysticism”, which both attracts and repels us. The entire enterprise completely ignores the system of secondary causes that constitutes what we call nature and which can only be grasped empirically. Nature is the proper concern of human knowledge and all speculation that seeks to go beyond nature is futile.

The criticism of Hegel has been embodied in a manifesto, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, which was aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of speculative philosophy and the establishment of a “new philosophy” based on empiricism and “sensuousness”. Feuerbach


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is best known for his book The Essence of Christianity which burst like a bombshell on the German intellectual scene in the early Forties and was soon translated into English by the English novelist, George Eliot. It quickly became like a Bible to an entire generation of intellectuals who thought of themselves as reformers and revolutionaries, including Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and David F. Strauss, who wrote that the book was the “truth for our times.”

Superficially, the central thesis is deceptively simple... Man—this is the mystery of religion— objectifies his being and then again makes himself an object to the objectivized image of himself thus converted into a subject … . The argument is an example of Feuerbach's “transformative method,” which Karl Marx thought was Feuerbach's contribution to philosophy.

The method states that Hegel's philosophy is based on the reification of abstract predicates like “thought” which are then treated as agents. Since this is the clue to understanding Hegel, it follows that what is valid in Hegel can be appropriated by inverting the subject and predicate and restoring them to their proper relationship. For example, instead of construing the predicate “thinking” as an agent, one transforms the equation and asserts that thinking is the activity of existing individuals. Thought comes out of being, not being out of thought. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach