Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (Landshut, Germany, July 28, 1804 – Rechenberg, Germany, September 13, 1872) was a German philosopher, anthropologist, biologist, and critic of religion. He is considered the intellectual father of contemporary atheistic humanism, also called anthropological atheism. For him immortality is a human creation and constitutes the basic germ of the anthropology of religion.

Feuerbach's critical materialism would have a profound effect on the thought of Richard Wagner, Max Stirner and Bakunin as well as on the theories of Marx and Engels and, in general, on all so-called historical materialism.

Biography

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was born in Landshut, Bavaria, in 1804, the son of Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach. He studied theology in Heidelberg but, disappointed with his teachers, he moved to Berlin, where he was a disciple of Hegel. Although at first he was greatly influenced by him, he quickly criticized his teacher's ideology following two axes that were the basis of his thought: the anthropological conception of all religion and the materialist criticism of all speculative thinking. Feuerbach publicly presented himself as an opponent of Hegel in 1839, with his article "For a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy"; published in the Franco-German Annals.

His critical character about religion did not allow him to teach until the revolution of 1848, when, demanded by his students in Heidelberg, he professed his theory of religion for a semester. Feuerbach became the master of the thought of the young Hegelians. Above all, he had an influence on Marx and Engels, although these would later distance themselves from his materialism in works such as the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) and The German Ideology (1846). His works include Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), where he denies the existence of God and another life, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy (1839), The essence of Christianity (1841) and Fundamental principles of the philosophy of the future (1843). In 1870 he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He died in 1872 in Rechenberg, near Nuremberg (Germany).

Feuerbach tomb in the Johannisfriedhof in Nuremberg

Feuerbach was the brother of Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach, Eduard Feuerbach, Friedrich Feuerbach and Joseph Anselm Feuerbach, the latter's son was a prominent German painter.

Feuerbach's Theory of Religion

Monument to Ludwig Feuerbach in Nuremberg.

In 1841, Feuerbach published The Essence of Christianity, a work with which the author became a reference point for the Hegelian left represented by the theologian David Strauss, who in his work The Life of Jesus considered the gospels to be mythical accounts.

Feuerbach's philosophy begins in open discussion with theology. Unlike Hegel, he will understand that philosophy is completely independent of religion; philosophy has the task of criticizing religion and not founding it. In the center and as the axis of his thought he installs the human being and therefore anthropology. He is heir to the humanist tradition. Revitalizing and expanding the thought of Xenophanes, Feuerbach argues that religious desires and claims and ideas are a specific characteristic of the human being, for which reason religion would be inscribed in anthropology, which must explain it.

His fundamental conceptions in terms of criticism of religion can be reduced to these formulas:

Religion is reflection, the reflection of the human essence in itself. ... God is for man the content of his most sublime feelings and ideas, is his generic book, in which he writes the names of his loved ones.

The evolution of Feuerbach's thought is evidenced in the following sentence:

My first thought was God, the second was reason and the third and last, man.

For Feuerbach, man has followed the same path: first he created God and later he understood that his knowledge was nothing more than a stepping stone in man's own knowledge.

Feuerbach, by considering God a human creation, denies his existence in the way Christian theology conceives of him. He also denied idealism, which seeks to replace the real man -corporeal and sensitive- by the "spirit"; and 'reason'.

For Feuerbach, therefore, it is not God who has created man in his image but, conversely, man who has created God, projecting his idealized image onto him. Man attributes to God his qualities and reflects on him his unrealized desires. Thus, alienating himself, he gives rise to his divinity. But why does he do it? The origin of this alienation is found in man himself. What man needs and desires, but cannot immediately achieve, he projects onto God. The word God has weight, seriousness and immanent meaning in the mouth of need, misery and privation. Contrary to what might be believed, the gods have not been invented by rulers or priests, who use them, but by suffering men. God is the echo of our cry of pain.

Feuerbach describes as a decisive turn in history the fact that man openly recognizes that the consciousness of God is nothing more than the consciousness of the species. Homo homini deus est (man is god to man).

The more man magnifies God, the more he impoverishes himself. Man projects his qualities into an ideal (unreal) being, denying them to himself. In this way, he reserves for himself what is lowest in him and considers himself nothing before the God he has created.

Concept of alienation (alienation)

The concept of alienation or alienation emerges from his critique of religion, perhaps the most influential of his work. He starts from an inversion of the terms: the subject by the predicate. God does not create man, man creates God projecting himself and projecting his best attributes on him. He is, then, simply a product of man. But this product becomes alien to its producer and dominates him. The properties of man are alienated in God, the object appears with its own life and dominates the subject. For Feuerbach, this alienation was in human consciousness, and a simple act of it could resolve it.

Karl Marx takes up this concept and expands it in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. For him, human alienation is not only found on the plane of consciousness, but on the real plane. Now man is alienated at work, and to resolve this alienation practical actions are needed, a philosophy of praxis.

Extended recap

While he considered himself a disciple of Hegel, he firmly applied the defense of his philosophy. In 1835, his teacher having died in the cholera epidemic four years earlier, he made an ardent defense of Hegel's position, under attack by one of his critics.

In 1839, Feuerbach himself would initiate a critical attitude against the author of the "Phenomenology of Spirit". And since the publication in 1841 of & # 34; The essence of Christianity & # 34;, his position would be included in that of the left Hegelians. They were direct or indirect disciples who criticized ideas such as the Hegelian conviction of the unity between the Christian religion as a product of revelation and philosophy.

Memorial stamp of 200 years of birth

The old Hegelians or more orthodox adepts carried out important work in the historical order, especially in the history of philosophy; the young left Hegelians gave strength and impetus to a progressive application of the doctrine to the political order.

Without strict ideological commitments, Feuerbach pursued "realisation" of Hegelian ideas. Feuerbach does not want to speculatively explain all reality from the immaterial, God or the Idea or pure spirit; he aspires to understand the concrete situation of human beings and of the totality of things in a sensualist way. He gives preeminence to perception and the senses, over thought.

Photograph by Ludwig Feuerbach

In his work on the nature of Christianity, he tries to show truths that he believes are found in religion under false presuppositions. He will say exhaustively: & # 34; The secret of theology is anthropology & # 34;. The anthropological discipline must be the denial of idealistic philosophy.

This is where the essential thought of the philosopher derives. The supposed divine properties are an alienated projection of human properties.

Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach

In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx criticizes the exclusively theoretical view of Feuerbach. Marx makes human conscience fall on the individual when it has a social component that inevitably leads to the question of what it responds to and how it works. For Marx, the dissolution of religion would not be enough, but rather:

It is in practice that man has to prove the truth, that is, the reality and the might, the earthlyness of his thought. The litigation about the reality or unreality of a thought that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic problem.

The coincidence of changing circumstances and human activity can only be conceived and understood rationally as a revolutionary practice.

Feuerbach in popular culture

Feuerbach's theories, especially his critique of religion, have been influential in the modern world, including popular culture, and reached a certain degree of diffusion when the album Aqualung, by the British rock group Jethro Tull, in which, on its cover, it was indicated that "in the beginning, man created God and gave him power over all things".

Famous quotes

He is credited with the phrase: "Man is what he eats". (Sämtliche Werke X. Stuttgart: Frommann Verlag, 1960)"