Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872)

Man created God: here's what the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach affirms, in this classic, first published in 1841!

God? A product of our imagination; an 'Ideal', made up from everything we value as being admirable, besides being devoid of our own weaknesses.

This view is striking, not least because it's about making mankind the heart of religion: Man, aware of himself and of his own shortcomings, projecting himself into an abstract image, as if in a mirror but a mirror that reflects show more back only perfection. We are mortals? God is immortal! We depend upon nature? God controls it, even, better, created it! We have limited knowledge and abilities? God knows all and can everything! In other words, God's features are not divine because God possesses them, but, on the contrary, it's because such features are, first and foremost, 'divine' (akin to perfection) that *we* attributed them to God.

The interpretation is remarkable. First, because it helps explaining the attributes of other Gods, in other myths and religions. Feuerbach, in fact, also applies it to Norse and Greek mythologies. Then, because it gives a new meaning to Creation and faith, and from the place and importance of Jesus to the relevance of the sacraments; all new meanings that the philosopher explores in short chapters, as punchy as they are polemical.

Here's a powerful insight, then, that every atheist, of course, ought to read. But not only... As it will influence from Marx and Engels to, even, Freud, here's a key train of thought that everyone interested in philosophy in general might want to discover. Very, very interesting. show less

How did I manage to go so long without reading Feuerbach? Why is he not better known among those of us who aver in the 21st century that There is no god but man? Regardless, I doubt I could have picked a better starting-point than the volume Lectures on the Essence of Religion, a text from 1851 in which he offers thirty lectures to explicate and enlarge on his earlier work The Essence of Religion (not to be confused with his best-known volume The Essence of Christianity). This book show more represents his mature thought in a somewhat conversational style.

Feuerbach discusses the true objects of “nature religion” (typified by classical paganism) and “spiritual religion” (typified by Christianity), and concludes that in both cases they are the human ideal, this-worldly and otherworldly respectively. In the twenty-fifth lecture, he provides an excellent argument against sui generis religion. He even declares (in 1851!): “The ultimate secret of religion is the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the voluntary and involuntary in one and the same individual.” (310-11)

On the whole, I found him incisive, witty, and fundamentally true to reality as I have encountered it. There were a couple of points on which I would differ with him. I don’t share his conviction that humanity as a whole will inevitably progress to a more rational condition. Also, although a few passages indicate that he knows better, he all too often uses “imagination” as a blank synonym for “delusion,” thus permitting the effects of false imagination and idle fantasy to eclipse the importance of the imaginative faculty in nurturing and realizing practical goals.

“In religion man does not satisfy other beings; he satisfies his own nature.” (76) Deus est homo, brother Ludwig! show less

When Ludwig Feuerbach declared "Anthropology" to be "the secret of Christian Theology," he was not referring to (the not-yet-invented) cultural anthropology, but to a study-of-the-human combining disciplinary features we would now probably class with psychology and philosophy. This equation is the central thesis of his most famous work, The Essence of Christianity.

The body of the book is divided into two parts. The first and longer part focuses on retrieving philosophical truths from the show more morass of Christian belief, and thus accounting for the empirical success of Christianity. The second part is intent on exposing the falsity and incoherence of Christian teachings, abominating "Christian sophistry," and rejecting the enterprise of speculative theology. I suppose that that sequence was the one most rhetorically appropriate to Feuerbach's own 19th-century audience. He could soften them up with approbations of "the essence of" Christianity (albeit from his unusual perspective) before condemning its visible intellectual superstructure. It might be more useful for many readers today to consider the parts in the reverse sequence: Feuerbach thus points the way to an esoteric understanding of traditional Christianity that opens onto a neo-Christian perspective in which genuine religious sentiment can be divorced from theological obfuscation.

A long appendix to the work is made up of "Explanations--Remarks--Illustrative Citations." These add few if any new ideas, and much of the text is untranslated Latin in my copy of the George Eliot translation. There are some other difficult features of the Eliot translation. She uses "negativing" where we would now say "negating," and "subjectivism/objectivism" where we might have "subjectivity/objectivity." Probably the greatest consequence for today's reader comes from her choice to use "thou" and "thee" to maintain the du (dich, dir) of informal second-person pronouns in German. But, mostly on account of the King James Bible being the contemporary Anglophone's main site of exposure to those archaic pronouns, they are now psychologically charged with authority and formality, rather than intimacy and approachability.

I have found Feuerbach's later writings somewhat more congenial and useful to my own positive philosophy of religion, but I am grateful for his climactic discourse here on the contradiction between faith and love, in which he declares himself a partisan of the latter. And while by "love" he does mean a general goodwill and sense of human care, this sense expressly includes sexual love. Feuerbach anathematizes Christian prescriptions for celibacy, and defends the principle of sexual pleasure, as well as the nobility of the generative process. "All the glory of Nature, all its power, all its wisdom and profundity, concentrates and individualises itself in the distinction of sex. Why then dost thou shrink from naming the nature of God by its true name?" (78)

Another feature of this book that I found valuable is Feuerbach's reflections on the Christian sacraments. "Even the Protestant -- not indeed in words, but in truth -- transforms God into an external thing, since he subjects Him to himself as an object of sensational enjoyment" (199). He emphasizes that the pleasure taken in eating and drinking is declared to be holy by means of the Eucharist, and that the real power of a sacramental bath -- as contrasted with its perverted, imaginary effect in Christian doctrine -- is to unite the baptisand with Nature and the world.

In a footnote to the first part, recognizing that orthodox interpreters will view his readings of traditional Christian ideas as "atrocious, impious, diabolical," Feuerbach declares: "I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood" (155). The party of the devils is fortunate to have him. show less

Editor/translator Hanfi considers Feuerbach valuable solely as a precursor to Marx, a perspective which certainly limits the usefulness of Hanfi's extensive introduction. The selections in this volume are quite worthwhile, however. Five out of eight are first ever published translations into English, and they include programmatic essays covering the span of Feuerbach's intellectual work from his first breaks with Hegel ("Toward a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy" 1839) until 1844. Although show more Hanfi doesn't remark it, the latter year is significant in being the year in which Feuerbach's writings were subjected to withering public criticism from Max Stirner. This volume thus neglects the significantly different (and to my mind, even more interesting) positions of the later Feuerbach developed in The Essence of Religion and its sequels. It does, however, include the essays "Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy" and "Principles of the Philosophy of the Future," which show Feuerbach's emergence from his anti-Hegelian analytic phase into a new work of synthesis and positive theory on atheistic, "sensuous" grounds. These two essays are in an aphoristic form that presages the work of Nietzsche, and they expound in part the anthropotheistic principle that is at the core of my interest in and sympathy for Feuerbach.

The early, anti-Hegelian pieces are often rather muddled, and this feature evidently stems from a stylistic limitation (later overcome) to attempt always to present flawed and obsolete philosophies from their own "point of view," to "let each phenomenon speak for itself." (179 n.) The constructive progress of Feuerbach's views is evident, due to the choronological arrangement of the contents of this collection, and the recapitulation involved in the final "Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development." The preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity is far more incisive and persuasive than the introduction to the first.

Even in the "Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy" there is much unwelcome (to my mind) valorization of pain and suffering. In the later works, this gives way to an emphasis on enjoyment and love. Throughout, once Feuerbach has broken with the "theologians and speculative fantasts," he emphasizes the reciprocity of humanity with sensual nature, and the sovereignty of man--however unwitting--over the God he has created.

"The new and only positive philosophy ... is the thinking man himself" (169). It is "certainly based on reason as well, but on a reason whose being is the same as the being of man; that is, it is based not on an empty, colorless, nameless reason, but on a reason that is of the very blood of man" (239). "Truth is man and not reason in abstracto; it is life and not thought that remains confined to paper, the element in which it finds and unfolds its existence" (249). "Truth does not exist in thought, nor in cognition confined to itself. Truth is only the totality of man's life and being" (244, all italics in originals).

There is much development evident in the writings collected here, but the book ends on an appropriate note: "What am I? Is that your question? Wait until I am no more." (296) He still had "more" to him, as subsequent decades and major works would show, even if they are not addressed by this volume. show less