Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach turned theology on its head with a single idea: God is the projection of humanity's own essence onto the heavens. Religion, he wrote, is the dream of the human mind. In worshipping God, humanity was unknowingly worshipping itself, and in the bargain it emptied itself of its own best powers, handing its love and reason and goodness to an imaginary being and kneeling before the gift. The secret of theology, Feuerbach announced, is anthropology. With that thesis he became the hinge on which German philosophy swung from Hegel toward Marx, and one of the most influential critics of religion the modern world has produced.

The corpus and how the chat cites it, with a word on the translator. This room reads The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841) in the famous 1854 English translation by Marian Evans, better known to the world as the novelist George Eliot. That the author of Middlemarch rendered Feuerbach into English is no footnote: his sensuous humanism, his conviction that the love once aimed at heaven belongs among human beings, runs straight into her moral imagination. The translation is public domain by way of Project Gutenberg. The chat cites by chapter or by work title. Expect citations to The Essence of Christianity by chapter.

Life. Feuerbach was born in 1804 in Bavaria, the son of a famous jurist, and went to Berlin to study theology before falling under the spell of Hegel's lectures and turning to philosophy. An early book, published anonymously, denied personal immortality and treated the idea as a human wish, and when his authorship became known it closed the door on any university career. So he lived as an independent scholar in rural retirement, reading and writing far from the lecture halls, and from that obscurity in 1841 he sent out the book that detonated across his generation. Engels would later recall that with one blow it made Young Hegelians into Feuerbachians, and the materialist turn in nineteenth-century thought began.

Where to begin. Read The Essence of Christianity, and read it in two movements as Feuerbach built it: first the true or anthropological essence of religion, which shows the human meaning hidden in each Christian doctrine, then the false or theological essence, which exposes the contradictions that arise once the projection is mistaken for a real being.

Theology is anthropology. The thesis at the core of the book is that the qualities humanity ascribes to God, infinite love, wisdom, goodness, and will, are in truth the qualities of the human species, raised to infinity and projected outward as though they belonged to another. God is humanity's own essence contemplated as a separate object; the consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of the species. Every statement about God, rightly read, is a disguised statement about the human. Theology is anthropology that has forgotten itself.

Religion as alienation. Projection has a cost, and naming it is Feuerbach's deepest move. The more humanity pours into God, the less it keeps for itself: God becomes all and man becomes nothing, God all-loving and man a worthless sinner, God infinitely rich on exactly the wealth that humanity has stripped from itself. Religion is the estrangement, the alienation, of the human essence, the species kneeling before a magnified image of its own powers and calling the image its master. It was this concept of alienation that Karl Marx would lift from Feuerbach and carry into his analysis of labor.

The cure, which is reclamation. Feuerbach does not want simply to demolish religion; he wants to redeem its truth. The predicates are real and precious, love and reason and justice and goodness; only the subject to which they were assigned, God, is an illusion. The task is to take back those divine predicates as the predicates of humanity, to let the love once spent on heaven flow to the human community, to put the love of the human being where the love of God had stood. Atheism, for Feuerbach, is not the loss of the divine but its repatriation to its rightful owner, the human species.

The inversion of Hegel. Hegel had made the material world the self-externalization of Spirit, treating thought as the ground of being. Feuerbach turns the relation over. The real, sensuous, material human being in nature is what is primary, and thought is one of its predicates rather than its source. Philosophy must begin not with the abstract "I think," nor with Spirit, but with the embodied, needy, feeling person. Speculative philosophy, he charged, is only rational theology in disguise, and the philosophy of the future is the dissolving of theology into anthropology.

Sensuousness, the species, and the I and the Thou. The new philosophy is rooted in the senses, the body, need, and feeling, and above all in the bond between human beings. The human is a species-being, conscious of itself as a species, and the divine attributes belong to humanity as a whole rather than to the solitary individual. The ground of truth and love is the meeting of an I and a Thou, the real other person who stands before me. His half-joking maxim that a man is what he eats is the blunt materialist edge of this turn toward the embodied, and his philosophy of the I and the Thou would later feed the thought of Martin Buber.

More than a bridge to Marx. Feuerbach is endlessly described as a mere stepping stone between Hegel and Marx, and it is true that Marx took his alienation and his materialism and then, in the Theses on Feuerbach, faulted him for a contemplative materialism that placed the human essence in the abstract individual rather than in the ensemble of social relations, and for interpreting the world when the point was to change it. But Feuerbach is more than a way station. His projection theory of religion is among the most fertile ideas of the century in its own right, running not only to Marx but to the psychology of religion and to secular humanism, and his philosophy of sensuousness, love, and the encounter has a life of its own.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Feuerbach detonated among the Young Hegelians and set the terms for everything that followed. Read now, he is the philosopher who called the gods back to earth and asked humanity to reclaim what it had given away. He inverted the idealism of G. W. F. Hegel; he handed Karl Marx the concept of alienation and the materialist turn, and earned the famous criticism of the Theses on Feuerbach; Max Stirner turned Feuerbach's own weapon against him, attacking the religion of Humanity as just another god; his philosophy of the I and the Thou flowed into Martin Buber; and his unmasking of religion as human projection belongs to the same line of suspicion that reaches Friedrich Nietzsche. His question, whether the divine is anything more than the human writ large, has never stopped being asked.