## 1. Biographical Introduction



Ludwig was the fourth son of the distinguished jurist, Paul Johann
Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. His nephew, the neo-classical painter,
Anselm Feuerbach, was the son of Ludwig's older brother, also
called Anselm, who was himself a classical archaeologist and
aesthetician "in the spirit of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and
Johann Joachim
 Winckelmann".[6]
 Ludwig's father, who studied philosophy and law at Jena in the
1790s with the Kantians, Karl Reinhold and Gottlieb Hufeland,
respectively, belonged to a group of distinguished northern German
scholars called to Bavaria during the period of administrative reform
under Maximilian Montgelas and charged with the task of modernizing
the legal and educational institutions of what became in 1806 the
modern kingdom of Bavaria. Other members of this group of so-called
*Nordlichter* or "northern lights" included F.I.
Niethammer, F.H. Jacobi (the godfather of Ludwig's younger
brother, Friedrich), and Friedrich Thiersch (the tutor of
Ludwig's two oldest brothers, who has sometimes been called
"the Humboldt of Bavaria"). P.J.A. Feuerbach was knighted
in recognition of his achievement in modernizing the Bavarian penal
code, though his political influence was dramatically curtailed as a
result of outspoken national-liberal criticisms of Napoleon expressed
in pamphlets he published in 1813 and 1814 (cf. Tomasoni 2015:
16-25).



Raised Protestant and religiously devout in his youth, Ludwig
matriculated in 1823 in the theological faculty of the University of
Heidelberg, where his father hoped he would come under the influence
of the late rationalist, H.E.G. Paulus. Ludwig was won over instead by
the speculative theologian, Karl Daub, who had been instrumental in
bringing Hegel to Heidelberg for two years in 1816, and was by this
time one of the foremost theologians of the Hegelian school. By 1824,
Ludwig had secured his father's grudging permission to transfer
to Berlin under the pretext of wanting to study with the theologians,
Friedrich Schleiermacher and August Neander, but in fact because of
his growing infatuation with Hegel's philosophy.
Feuerbach's matriculation at Berlin was delayed because of
suspicions of his involvement in the politically subversive student
fraternity (*Burschenschaft*) movement, in which two of his
older brothers were active, for which reason one of them (Karl, a
talented mathematician) was imprisoned and subsequently attempted
suicide. In 1825, to his father's consternation, Ludwig
transferred to the philosophical faculty, thereafter hearing within a
two-year period all of Hegel's lectures, except for those on
aesthetics, repeating the lectures on logic
 twice.[7]



Feuerbach defended his Latin dissertation, *De ratione, una,
universali, infinita*, at the University of Erlangen in 1828. Soon
thereafter, he began to deliver lectures on the history of modern
philosophy at the same university, a bastion of theological and
political conservatism many of whose faculty were closely associated
with the neo-Pietist Awakening. One colleague of Feuerbach's at
Erlangen was Julius Friedrich Stahl, who would go on to become a
leading theorist of conservatism, and was associated by Feuerbach with
the so-called "positive philosophy" of the late Schelling.
Feuerbach imprudently appended to his first book, *Thoughts on
Death and Immortality* (1830, hereafter *Thoughts*; see
 Section 2
 below), which was published anonymously, but to no avail, a number of
scathingly satirical and even vulgar couplets (*Xenien*)
directed against the Pietists that effectively destroyed his prospects
for an academic career.



During the 1830s, Feuerbach published three books on the history of
modern philosophy, in addition to several essays and reviews. These
include the *History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to
Spinoza* (1833), *History of Modern Philosophy: Presentation,
Development, and Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy* (1837),
and *Pierre Bayle: A Contribution to the History of Philosophy and
Humanity* (1838), none of which have been translated into
 English.[8]
 The first won him the praise of Edward Gans and an invitation from
Leopold von Henning to contribute reviews to the *Annals for
Scientific Criticism*, the principal journal of the Hegelian
academic establishment in Berlin. In these reviews, Feuerbach defended
the Hegelian philosophy vigorously against critics such as Karl
Bachmann. Even after the publication of the works on Leibniz and
Bayle, however, his efforts to secure an academic appointment remained
unsuccessful. He was able for several decades to sustain his existence
as an independent scholar in the remote Frankish village of Bruckberg
by virtue of his wife, Bertha Low, having been partial heir of a
porcelain factory located there, from a modest pension due to his
father's service to Bavaria, and from publishing royalties.



The event that precipitated the gradual dissolution of the Hegelian
synthesis of faith and knowledge (a process later referred to
sardonically by Marx and Engels as the "putrefaction of absolute
spirit") was the publication in two volumes in 1835-36 of
D.F. Strauss's *Life of Jesus Critically Examined*. In
this controversial work, Strauss used the tools of historical
criticism he had acquired from his Tubingen teacher, F.C. Baur,
to develop a compelling argument for the historical unreliability of
the accounts of the life of Jesus preserved in the canonical gospels.
In a relatively brief "concluding dissertation" at the end
of this lengthy work of biblical criticism, Strauss appealed to
Hegel's philosophy in proposing to interpret the doctrine of the
incarnation of Christ as a mythological expression of the
philosophical truth of the identity of the divine spirit and the human
species (conceived as the community of finite spirits existing
throughout history, and not as the historical individual, Jesus of
Nazareth). The appearance of Strauss's book confirmed the
suspicions of theological conservatives like E.W. Hengstenberg and
Heinrich Leo that Hegel's philosophy, despite its use of
Christian terminology, is incompatible with the historical faith, and
the editors of the Berlin Annals felt compelled to publicly discredit
Strauss's Hegelian credentials. It was in the wake of these
events that Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer established the
*Halle Annals for German Science and Art*, which served for
several years as the principal literary organ of the so-called Young
Hegelians. Among the essays and reviews that Feuerbach began to
contribute to the *Halle Annals* in 1838 is one entitled
"Toward a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy" (1839), in
which he began to distance himself publicly from the Hegelian cause,
calling for a "return to nature," as well as for a
naturalistic explanation of the mysteries of Christianity and of
religion more
 generally.[9]
 Publication of the *Halle Annals* was suspended by the
Prussian censor in 1841.



Feuerbach achieved the height of his brief literary fame with the
publication, also in 1841, of *The Essence of Christianity*, a
work that made a striking impression on a number of his
contemporaries. Engels recalled the appearance of this book as having
a profoundly "liberating effect" on him and Marx by
"breaking the spell" of the Hegelian system and
establishing the truths that human consciousness is the only
consciousness or spirit that exists, and that it is ontologically
dependent upon the physical existence of human beings as part of
nature (Engels 1888: 12-13). In 1844, Marx wrote to Feuerbach,
with reference to the latter's *Principles of the Philosophy
of the Future* (1843; hereafter *Principles*) and *The
Essence of Faith According to Luther* (1844), that in them he had,
intentionally or not, "given socialism a philosophical
foundation" (*GW* v. 18, p. 376). In fact, Feuerbach was
only then beginning to acquaint himself with socialist ideas through
his reading of authors like Lorenz von Stein and Wilhelm Weitling. In
the end, he declined Marx's request for a contribution to the
*German-French Annals*, as well as Ruge's urging that he
become more politically engaged. He came out of rural seclusion to
observe, with great anticipation followed by mounting disillusionment,
the events in Frankfurt in 1848, and to deliver a series of public
lectures at Heidelberg beginning the same year. Rather than working to
spell out in detail the "philosophy of the future" for
which he himself had called in the early 1840s, Feuerbach continued to
focus his attention mainly on religion in works including *The
Essence of Religion* (1845), *Lectures on the Essence of
Religion* (1851), and *Theogony According to the Sources of
Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity* (1857). The five years
of philological labor he invested in the latter work, which he
considered his crowning achievement, went largely unnoticed both by
his contemporaries and by posterity.



During the 1840s, Feuerbach corresponded, and occasionally visited and
maintained close personal relationships with, several leading German
radicals, including, in addition to Ruge and Marx, the publishers,
Otto Luning, Otto Wigand, and Julius Frobel; the
revolutionary poet, Georg Herwegh, and his wife, Emma; Hermann Kriege,
a freelance activist and early German socialist who emigrated to
America; as well as the scientific materialists, Carl Vogt and Jacob
Moleschott. It was in a review of a book on nutrition published by the
latter figure that Feuerbach famously quipped, "Man ist, was man
isst," making a play on words that doesn't come
through in the English expression, "You are what you eat."
The impression made by Feuerbach on several leading lights of the
younger generation is reflected in Gottfried Keller's
*Bildungsroman*, *Green Henry* (1855), which features a
character inspired by Feuerbach, as well as in the original dedication
(to Feuerbach) of Richard Wagner's early book, *The Art-Work
of the Future* (1850).



Partly as the result of a global financial crisis, the porcelain
factory that had supported Feuerbach's literary existence went
bankrupt in 1859. The following year he and his wife and daughter were
forced to relocate to the village of Rechenberg, located then on the
outskirts of Nuremberg, where Feuerbach lived out the remainder of his
life in increasingly ill health. Although his productivity as a writer
declined sharply during this period, he was able, in 1866, to bring
out the tenth and final volume of his collected works (which had begun
to appear in 1846), bearing the title, *God, Freedom and
Immortality from the Standpoint of Anthropology*, and including a
fairly substantial, though fragmentary, essay "On Spiritualism
and Materialism, Especially in Relation to the Freedom of the
Will". In this essay, and in an essay on ethics that Feuerbach
left incomplete at his death, we find him beginning to sketch out a
moral psychology, and an eudaimonistic ethical theory, in which the
concept of the "drive-to-happiness"
(*Gluckseligkeitstrieb*) plays a central role.


## 2. Early Idealistic Pantheism



In an essay published in 1835, Heinrich Heine observed that pantheism
had by this time become "the secret religion of
 Germany".[10]
 That Feuerbach is generally remembered as an atheist and a
materialist has tended to obscure the fact that he began his
philosophical career as an enthusiastic adherent of this philosophical
religion, one early expression of which can be found in the Greek
words "*Hen kai Pan*" (One and All) inscribed in
1791 by Holderlin in Hegel's student album from
Tubingen (cf. Pinkard 2000:
 32).[11]
 This inscription is an allusion to words uttered by Lessing after
reading Goethe's poem-fragment, "Prometheus", and
responding enthusiastically by declaring himself a Spinozist,
according to the account contained in Jacobi's famous
*Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza* (1785; cf. Jacobi [MPW]:
187). It was the publication of these letters that set off the
original Pantheism Controversy, and had the unintended effect of
leading more than one generation of young German poets and thinkers to
regard Spinoza no longer as a "dead dog" and a godless
atheist, but rather as the God-intoxicated sage of a pantheistic creed
in which those who, like Lessing, could no longer
"stomach" orthodox conceptions of the divinity that make a
strict distinction between creator and creation, could seek to satisfy
their spiritual aspirations. Feuerbach included several verses of the
Prometheus-fragment as an epigram to his first book, in which he used
the tools of Hegelian logic to develop a conception of the divinity as
One and All along lines laid out by Spinoza, Giordano Bruno and Jacob
Boehme. These three he hailed as 'pious God-inspired
sages' (GTU 241/48) who set the table for the 'feast of
reconciliation' (GTU 463/214) between nature and spirit that it
is that task of the modern age to celebrate. But this reconciliation,
he argued, cannot occur as long as God continues to be thought of as
an individual person existing independently of the world.



That Feuerbach, unlike Strauss, never accepted Hegel's
characterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clear
from the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with his
dissertation in
 1828.[12]
 In this letter he identified the historical task remaining in the
wake of Hegel's philosophical achievement to be the
establishment of the "sole sovereignty of reason" in a
"kingdom of the Idea" that would inaugurate a new
spiritual dispensation. Foreshadowing arguments put forward in his
first book, Feuerbach went on in this letter to emphasize the need for
"the I, the self in general, which especially since the
beginning of the Christian era, has ruled the world and has thought of
itself as the only spirit that exists at all [to be] cast down from
its royal throne" (*GW* v. 17, *Briefwechsel* I
(1817-1839), 103-08). This, he proposed, would require
prevailing ways of thinking about time, death, this world and the
beyond, individuality, personhood and God to be radically transformed
within and beyond the walls of academia.



Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of
thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he
presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against
those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain
limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative
philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued,
presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the
individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for
apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of
reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking
subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking
(*Denken*) is not an activity performed by the individual, but
rather by "the species" acting through the individual.
"In thinking", Feuerbach wrote, "I am bound together
with, or rather, I am one with--indeed, I myself am--all
human beings" (*GW* I:18).



In the introduction to *Thoughts* Feuerbach assumes the role of
diagnostician of a spiritual malady by which he claims that modern
moral subjects are afflicted. This malady, which he does not name but
might have called either individualism or egoism, he takes to be the
defining feature of the modern age insofar as this age conceives of
"the single human individual for himself in his individuality
[...] as divine and infinite" (*GTU* 189/10). The
principal symptom of this malady is the loss of "the perception
[*Anschauung*] of the true totality, of oneness and life in one
unity" (*GTU* 264/66). This loss Feuerbach finds
reflected in three general tendencies of the modern age: 1) the
tendency to regard human history solely as the history of the opinions
and actions of individual human subjects, and not as the history of
humanity conceived as a single collective agent; 2) the tendency to
regard nature as a mere aggregate of "countless single stars,
stones, plants, animals, elements and things" (*GTU*
195/14) whose relations to one another are entirely external and
mechanical, rather than as an organic whole the internal dynamics of
which are animated by a single all-encompassing vital principle; and
3) the tendency to conceive of God as a personal agent whose
inscrutable will, through which the world came into being from nothing
and is continually directed, is unconstrained by rational
necessity.



Feuerbach's basic objection to the theistic conception of God
and his relation to creation is that, on it, both are conceived as
equally spiritless. Rather than consisting of lifeless matter to which
motion is first imparted by the purposeful action of an external
agent, Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself the
principle of its own development. It exercises "unlimited
creative power" by ceaselessly dividing and distinguishing its
individual parts from one another. But the immeasurable multiplicity
of systems within systems that results from this activity constitutes
a single organic totality.



> 
> 
> Nature is ground and principle of itself, or--what is the same
> thing, it exists out of necessity, out of the soul, the essence of
> God, in which he is one with nature. (*GTU* 291/86)
> 
> 
> 



God, on this view, is not a skilled mechanic who acts upon the world,
but a prolific artist who lives in and through it.



In *Thoughts*, Feuerbach further argues that the death of
finite individuals is not merely an empirical fact, but also an *a
priori* truth that follows from a proper understanding of the
relations between the infinite and the finite, and between essence and
existence. Nature is the totality of finite individuals existing in
distinction from one another in time and space. Since to be a finite
individual is not to be any number of other individuals from which one
is distinct, non-being is not only the condition of individuals before
they have begun to exist and after they have ceased to do so, but also
a condition in which they participate by being the determinate
entities that they are. Thus, being and non-being, or life and death,
are equally constitutive of the existence of finite entities
throughout the entire course of their generation and destruction.



Everything that exists has an essence that is distinct from its
existence. Although individuals exist in time and space, their
essences do not. Essence in general is timeless and unextended.
Feuerbach nevertheless regards it as a kind of cognitive space in
which individual essences are conceptually contained. Real or
three-dimensional space, within which individual things and people
exist in distinction from one another and in temporal succession, he
thinks of as essence "in the determination of its
being-outside-of-itself" (*GTU* 250/55). In his
being-one, Feuerbach argues, God is everything-as-one, and is, as
such, the universal essence in which all finite essences are
"grounded, contained and comprehended
[*begriffen*]" (*GTU* 241/48).



It is by means of *Empfindung* or sense experience that
sentient beings are able to distinguish individuals from one another,
including, in some instances, individuals that share the same essence.
The form of experience is temporality, which is to say that whatever
is directly experienced occurs "now", or at the moment in
time to which we refer as "the present". Experience, in
other words, is essentially transitory, and its contents are
incommunicable. What we experience are the perceivable features of
individual objects. It is through the act of thinking that we are able
to identify those features through the possession of which different
individuals belong to the same species, with the other members of
which they share these essential features in common.



Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking
is not an activity performed by the individual person *qua*
individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously
referred in the *Phenomenology* as "'I' that
is 'We' and 'We' that is
'I'" (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit is
nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker
participates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinking
agent. That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness of
individual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due not to the
nature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and to
the fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participate
in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as
corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus
not *pure* spirit.



A biological species is both identical with, and distinct from, the
individual organisms of which it is composed. The species has no
existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the
perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and
destruction of these *particular* individuals. Similarly,
Spirit has no existence apart from the existence of individual
self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes conscious of itself
(i.e., constitutes itself as Spirit). Just as the life of a biological
species only appears in the generation and destruction of individual
organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the generation and
destruction of these individual persons. Viewed in this light,
Feuerbach maintains, the death of the individual is necessitated by
the life of infinite Spirit.



> 
> 
> Death is just the withdrawal and departure of your objectivity from
> your subjectivity, which is eternally living activity and therefore
> everlasting and immortal. (*GTU* 323/111)
> 
> 
> 



Arguing thus, he urges his readers to acknowledge and accept the
irreversibility of their individual mortality so that, in doing so,
they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their
species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is
not the individual person with whom they are accustomed to identifying
themselves. They will then be in a position to recognize that, while
"the shell of death is hard, its kernel is sweet"
(*GTU* 205/20), and that the true belief in immortality is



> 
> 
> a belief in the infinity of Spirit and in the everlasting youth of
> humanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, in
> its eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb of
> its plenitude and granting new beings for the glorification,
> enjoyment, and contemplation of itself. (*GTU* 357/137)
> 
> 
> 



In light of the emphasis placed in his later works on the pressing
existential needs of the embodied individual subject, it should be
noted that, during his early idealistic phase, Feuerbach was strongly
committed to a theoretical ideal of philosophy according to which
contemplation of, and submersion in, God is the highest
*ethical* act of which human beings are capable. Whereas, in
his later works, Feuerbach would seek to compel philosophy



> 
> 
> to come down from its divine and self-sufficient blissfulness in
> thought and open its eyes to *human misery*, (*GPZ*
> 264/3)
> 
> 
> 



here he spoke instead of



> 
> 
> the painful whimpering of the sick and the last moans of the dying as
> victory songs of the species [in which it] celebrates its reality and
> victorious lordship over the single phenomenon. (*GTU* 302/
> 95)
> 
> 
> 


## 3. Feuerbach as Historian of Philosophy



The understanding of reason as one and universal that underlies the
works discussed in the preceding section also informs the approach
taken by Feuerbach to the history of philosophy in the three
previously mentioned books, and in a series of lectures, that he
produced during the
 1830s.[13]
 In his lectures on the history of modern philosophy, Feuerbach
emphasizes that philosophical reflection is an activity to which human
beings are *driven*. The history of the philosophical systems
that this activity has produced, he maintains, is conceived only
subjectively, and thus inadequately, so long as it is regarded as the
history of the opinions of individual thinkers. Because thinking is a
species-activity, the philosophical systems that have arisen in the
course of the history of philosophy should be regarded as necessary
standpoints of reason itself. The Idea is not something first produced
by philosophical reflection. Rather, the individual thinker, to the
extent the he or she succeeds in transcending his or her
individuality, comes to function as an instrument or organ through
which the Idea actualizes one of its moments, which is later
reproduced in the consciousness of the historian of philosophy. The
activity of the Idea is experienced subjectively as inspiration
(*Begeisterung*). In producing itself, the Idea does not pass
from nonbeing into being, but rather from one state of being (being in
itself) to another (being for itself). The Idea produces itself by
determining itself, and human consciousness is the medium of its
self-actualization.



> 
> 
> Reason is nothing but the *self-activity* of the eternal,
> infinite idea, whether in art or religion or philosophy, but this
> activity is always the activity of the Idea in a *particular
> determination* and thus also at a *particular time*, for it
> is precisely according to the particular determinations of the idea
> that enter successively into human consciousness that we differentiate
> the periods and epochs of history. (*VGP* 11)
> 
> 
> 



The emergence of new philosophical systems results, on this view, from
a necessity that is both internal and external. Certain philosophical
ideas are only capable of being conceived and articulated under
specific historical conditions. Just as it was only possible for
Christianity to appear at that point in history when the ties that
bound family and nation in Greco-Roman antiquity were dissolving, so
it was only possible for modern philosophy to appear under specific
historical conditions. Feuerbach locates the beginning of the history
of modern philosophy at the point where the modern spirit first begins
to distinguish itself from the medieval spirit. The dominant principle
of the medieval period was the Judeo-Christian, monotheistic
principle, according to which God is conceived as an omnipotent person
through an act of whose will the material world was created from
nothing (*ex nihilo*). It is because nature, as conceived from
this standpoint, is excluded from the divine substance, according to
Feuerbach, that medieval thought showed so little interest in the
investigation of nature. It is only where the substantiality of nature
begins to be rediscovered that the spirit of modernity distinguishes
itself from the medieval spirit. This occurs most clearly where matter
comes to be regarded as an attribute of the divine substance, so that
God is no longer conceived of as a being distinct from nature but
rather as the immutable and eternal imminent cause from which the
plenitude of finite shapes in nature pours forth. This happens first
among the nature philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, and
subsequently in the speculative reflections of Jakob Bohme and in
the system of Spinoza. Indeed, it is one distinctive feature of
Feuerbach's view of the history of modern philosophy that he
thinks of it as beginning, not with Descartes, but with the nature
philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Feuerbach insists upon the
speculative significance of Bacon's philosophy of nature. It is
precisely in subjecting nature to experimentation, and thereby to
rational comprehension, that spirit raises itself above nature. But
while Feuerbach emphasizes the philosophical importance of experience
in the modern rediscovery of nature, he nevertheless insists that
empiricism lacks a "principle" of its own. Later he will
speak of the need for an alliance between German metaphysics and
"*the anti-scholastic, sanguine principle of French
sensualism and materialism*" (*VT* 254-255/165,
emphasis in the original).



Feuerbach's conviction that Christian faith is inimical to
reason and philosophy was strengthened by his own studies of the
history of modern philosophy, especially his studies of Leibniz and
Bayle. As previously noted, his monographs on these figures were
written during the period of controversy following the appearance of
Strauss's *Life of Jesus*. Toward the end of the 1830s,
the Young Hegelians were increasingly opposed on two fronts: on the
one hand, by right-wing Hegelians such as Friedrich Goschel, who
insisted upon the compatibility of Hegelianism and Protestant
orthodoxy, and, on the other, by representatives of the so-called
"Positive Philosophy", who, taking their inspiration from
the late Schelling, identified the personality of God as disclosed in
the Christian revelation as the supreme metaphysical principle (cf.
Breckman 1999 and Gooch 2011). It is in light of these developments
that, beginning in the Leibniz monograph, Feuerbach sought
increasingly to distinguish from one another, and to demonstrate the
incompatibility of, what he refers to there as "the
philosophical standpoint" and "the theological
standpoint", respectively. Feuerbach regards the theological
standpoint as "practical" because it imagines God as a
being separate from the world, upon which he acts according to
purposes similar to those that guide the actions of human beings,
rather than conceiving the world as a necessary, and hence rationally
intelligible, consequence of the divine nature. To be sure, for
Leibniz, there is nothing arbitrary about the divine will. God's
will is determined by his infinite wisdom and goodness, which compel
him to choose to create the best possible world. But this attempt to
synthesize rational necessity and divine sovereignty remains in
Feuerbach's view an unacceptable compromise. Like Tycho Brahe,
who sought to combine the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomies, he
thinks Leibniz sought to reconcile the irreconcilable. Feuerbach took
Leibniz's theory of monads to be an original philosophical
position that offers a genuinely novel conception of substance, and an
alternative to the mechanistic-mathematical Cartesian account of
motion, and thus constitutes an organic link in the developmental
sequence of historical philosophical systems. He criticized Leibniz,
however, for not having derived the unity or harmony of the monads
from the nature of the monads themselves, and for appealing instead to
a theological representation of God as an alien, external power who
achieves this harmonization miraculously, and hence, inexplicably.



Although, considered superficially, Feuerbach's study of Bayle
is a continuation of the line of inquiry pursued in his earlier
historical monographs, closer inspection confirms Rawidowicz's
observation that this book marks an important turning point in his
intellectual development (Rawidowicz 1964: 62-62). The book is
full of digressions that go on for many pages without making any
reference to Bayle, which can produce an impression that it lacks a
clearly defined focus. In fact Feuerbach is here moving toward, and
building a case for, a claim that he articulates more explicitly in
succeeding years, namely, that the "practical negation" of
Christianity is a *fait accompli* insofar as the scientific,
economic, aesthetic, ethical and political values and institutions
that are constitutive of modern European culture are incompatible with
the demands of authentic Christian faith as expressed in the Bible and
in the writings of patristic and medieval authors, who are either
indifferent or inimical to the scientific investigation of nature, the
acquisition of wealth, the pursuit of artistic creativity as an end in
itself, and attempts to establish ethical and political norms on the
basis of universally valid rational principles rather than the
authority of revelation or of the Church.



Although the Protestant Reformation, in its rejection of clerical
celibacy, its affirmation of the vocation of the laity, and its
separation of temporal and spiritual authority, resolved the
contradiction between the spirit and the flesh that was characteristic
of medieval Catholicism, Feuerbach argues, it failed to resolve the
contradiction between faith and reason, or theology and philosophy.
Bayle's historical significance for Feuerbach consists in his
uncompromising exposure of this contradiction, which, because it was
so deeply rooted in Bayle's own character, he himself could only
resolve by embracing fideism. Feuerbach sought to further expose this
contraction in his 1839 essay, "On Philosophy and
Christianity", in which he for the first time publicly
repudiated the Hegelian claim that philosophy affirms in the form of
conceptual thinking the same truths affirmed by religion in the form
of sensible representations.


## 4. The Critique of Christianity



In a section of the preface to the second edition of *The Essence
of Christianity* (1843) that Eliot omitted from her translation,
Feuerbach reveals that he had sought in this book to achieve two
things: First, to attack the Hegelian claim for the identity of
religious and philosophical truth by showing that Hegel succeeds in
reconciling religion with philosophy only by robbing religion of its
most distinctive content. Second,



> 
> 
> to place the so-called positive philosophy in a most fatal light by
> showing that the original of its idolatrous image of God
> [*Gotzenbild*] is man, that flesh and blood belong to
> personality essentially. (*WC* 10-11)
> 
> 
> 



Appreciation of each of these objectives requires further
clarification of the historical context in which Feuerbach's
book appeared, namely one year after the ascension to the Prussian
throne of the Romantic conservative, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The new
king's inner circle of advisers consisted of devout aristocrats
closely associated with the neo-Pietist Awakening, who sought to
establish a German-Christian state as a bulwark against the influence
of subversive ideas on the continent. 1840 also saw the death of the
Prussian minister of culture, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, who had
been a supporter of the Hegelian cause and a bearer of the hopes of
the Young Hegelians both for academic advancement and for a Prussian
state informed by a progressive Protestant ethos amenable to the
freedom of theoretical inquiry. The wedge driven by the outcry
surrounding the appearance of Strauss's book between the right
and left wings of the Hegelian camp made this "center"
position increasingly untenable. The policies of Altenstein's
successor, including the appointment, in 1841, of Schelling to the
chair in Berlin formerly occupied by Hegel, were aimed instead at
slaying the "dragonseed" of Hegelian pantheism in the
universities under Prussian jurisdiction (cf. Pinkard 2002:
317-332).



By the time Feuerbach published his most famous book, *The Essence
of Christianity* (1841), in which he sought to develop "a
philosophy of positive religion or revelation" (*WC* 3),
he had begun to move away from his earlier idealistic
 pantheism.[14]
 That he nevertheless sought in this book to criticize both Hegelian
speculative theology and the positive philosophy from "the same
standpoint" taken by Spinoza in his *Theologico-Political
Treatise* (*VWR* 16/9; cf. *WC* 10-11) has
often been overlooked. At one point in the *Treatise* Spinoza
observes that the biblical authors



> 
> 
> imagined God as ruler, legislator, king, merciful, just, etc., despite
> the fact that all the latter are merely attributes of human nature and
> far removed from the divine nature. (Spinoza [1677] 2007: 63)
> 
> 
> 



In *Christianity*, Feuerbach makes a similar distinction
between the metaphysical and personal divine predicates. God
considered as the theoretical object of rational reflection, or
"God as God", is a timeless and impassible entity that is
unaffected by human suffering and ultimately indistinguishable from
reason itself.



> 
> 
> The consciousness of human nullity that is bound up with consciousness
> of this being is in no way a religious consciousness; it is much more
> characteristic of skeptics, materialists, naturalists and pantheists.
> (*WC* 89/44)
> 
> 
> 



It is God's personal predicates that concern the religious
believer, for whom God exists, not as an object of theoretical
contemplation, but of feeling, imagination, and prayerful
supplication.



Whereas the metaphysical predicates, which "serve only as
external points of support to religion" (*WC* 62/25), can
be thought of as ones that apply to the first person of the Trinity
(i.e., God in his abstract universality), the second person of the
Trinity, by virtue of his having subjected himself, for the salvation
of humanity, to a humble birth and an ignominious death, "is the
sole, true, first person in religion" (*WC* 106/51). The
doctrine of the Incarnation, Feuerbach argues against Hegel, is not,
for the Christian believer, a symbolic representation of the eternal
procession and return of infinite spirit into, and back from, its
finite manifestations. It is rather "a tear of divine compassion
[*Mitleid*]" (*WC* 102/50), and, as such, the act
of a sacred heart that is able to sympathize with human suffering.
That God was compelled by his love for humanity to renounce his
divinity and become human Feuerbach takes as proof that "Man was
already *in* God, was already *God himself*, before God
became man" (ibid.), i.e., that belief in divine compassion
involves the attribution or projection onto God of a moral sentiment
that can only be experienced by a being capable of suffering, which
"God as God" is not.



*The Essence of Christianity* is divided into two parts. In the
first part, Feuerbach considers religion "in its agreement with
the human essence" (*WC* 75). Here he argues that, when
purportedly theological claims are understood in their proper sense,
they are recognized as expressing anthropological, rather than
theological, truths. That is, the predicates that religious believers
apply to God are predicates that *properly* apply to the human
species-essence of which God is an imaginary representation. In the
second part, Feuerbach considers religion "in its contradiction
with the human essence" (*WC* 316). Here he argues that,
when theological claims are understood in the sense in which they are
ordinarily taken (i.e., as referring to a non-human divine person),
they are
 self-contradictory.[15]
 In early 1842, Feuerbach still preferred that his views be presented
to the public under the label "anthropotheism" rather than
"atheism" (*GW* v. 18, 164), emphasizing that his
overriding purpose in negating "the false or theological essence
of religion" had been to affirm its "true or
anthropological essence", i.e., the divinity of man.



Feuerbach begins *The Essence of Christianity* by proposing
that, since human beings have religion and animals do not, the key to
understanding religion must be directly related to whatever it is that
most essentially distinguishes human beings from animals. This, he
maintains, is the distinctive kind of consciousness that is involved
in the cognition of
 universals.[16]
 A being endowed with such "species-consciousness" is able
to take its own essential nature as an object of thought. The capacity
for thought is conceived here as the capacity to engage in internal
dialogue, and thus to be aware of oneself as containing both an I and
a Thou (a generic other), so that, in the act of thinking, the human
individual stands in a relation to his species in which non-human
animals, and human beings *qua* biological organisms, are
incapable of standing. When a human being is conscious of himself (or
herself) as human, he is conscious of himself not only as a thinking
being, but also as a willing and a feeling being.



> 
> 
> The power of thinking is the light of knowledge [*des
> Erkenntnis*], the power of the will is the energy of character,
> the power of the heart is love. (*WC* 31/3)
> 
> 
> 



These are not powers that the individual has at his or her disposal.
They are rather powers that manifest themselves psychologically in the
form of non-egoistic species-drives (*Gattungstriebe*) by which
individuals periodically find themselves overwhelmed, especially those
poets and thinkers in whose works the species-essence is most clearly
 instantiated.[17]
 Such manifestations include the experiences of erotic and platonic
love; the drive to knowledge; the experience of being moved by the
emotion expressed in music; the voice of conscience, which compels us
to moderate our desires to avoid infringing on the freedom of others;
compassion; admiration; and the urge to overcome our own moral and
intellectual limitations. The latter urge, Feuerbach contends,
presupposes an awareness that our individual limitations are
*not* limitations of the species-essence, which functions thus
as the norm or ideal toward which the individual's efforts at
self-transcendence are directed.



The individual human being is limited both physically and morally. Our
physical existence is limited in time and space. We are also
limited--and often painfully aware of our being so--in our
intellectual and moral capacities. But I only experience as a painful
limitation my inability to be and do things that others of my kind are
able to be and to do, so that, in recognizing my own limitations, I
simultaneously recognize that they are *not* limitations of the
species. If they were, either I would not be aware of them at all, or
I would not experience my awareness of them as painful. For example, I
only reprove myself for cowardice because I am aware of the bravery of
others, which I myself lack, and for my stinginess because I am aware
of the generosity of others, which I myself lack. The experience of
conscience--taken in the broad sense as an awareness of
one's moral and intellectual shortcomings and
inadequacies--thus presupposes species-consciousness in the form
of an awareness of qualities that one finds oneself lacking but can
imagine oneself, under other circumstances, possessing.



Feuerbach's central claim in *The Essence of
Christianity* is that Christian theism is predicated upon an
alienated form of human self-consciousness wherein human beings relate
themselves to their own human species-essence as though it were a
being distinct from themselves. Although, in developing this claim,
Feuerbach was clearly influenced by Hegel's account of Unhappy
Consciousness in the *Phenomenology*, Ameriks' contention
that



> 
> 
> Feuerbach's philosophical doctrines [...] can be understood
> as little more than a filling out of the details of Hegel's
> scathing account of orthodox Christianity as a form of "unhappy
> consciousness" (Ameriks 2000: 259)
> 
> 
> 



is problematic for several reasons. First, it overlooks the likelihood
of Hegel's having understood his analysis of Unhappy
Consciousness to apply to the otherworldliness he associated with
medieval Catholicism, or perhaps to otherworldly religion more
generally, but not in any case to the type of Protestantism that he
regarded as "the religion of the modern age" (Hegel [1807]
1977: 14), and in which he found the sacred and the secular
reconciled. Second, it overlooks the fact that Feuerbach's
appropriation of themes found in Hegel's account of Unhappy
Consciousness occurs in the context of an explicit, albeit incomplete,
repudiation of Hegel's philosophy of spirit. Unlike Hegel, who
conceives of Unhappy Consciousness as a moment in the development of
human self-consciousness *that is also* a moment in the
coming-to-be-for-itself of the absolute, Feuerbach has by this time
reached the conclusion that one cannot distinguish absolute spirit
from "subjective spirit or the essence of man" without, in
the end, continuing to occupy "the old standpoint of
theology" (*VT* 246-247). Third, it overlooks the
significance of Feuerbach's emphasis on the importance, for
grasping the essence of religion, of precisely those subjective
aspects of religious consciousness (imagination and feeling) that
Hegel himself regarded as inessential or of secondary importance.
Finally, in connection with this third point, it overlooks the
significance of Feuerbach's agreement with Spinoza against Hegel
that "faith [...] requires not so much truth as
piety" (Spinoza [1677] 2007: 184).



In a short essay, published 1842, in which he sought to clarify the
difference between his own approach to the philosophy of religion and
Hegel's, Feuerbach suggested that this difference is most
evident in the relations in which each of them stands to
Schleiermacher, who famously defined religion as the feeling of utter
dependence. Whereas Hegel had "rebuked" Schleiermacher for
abdicating the truth-claims of the Christian faith by taking the
articles of faith as expressions of this feeling, Feuerbach says he
does so only because Schleiermacher was prevented by his
"theological prejudice" from drawing the unavoidable
conclusion that, "if feeling is subjectively what religion is
chiefly about, then God is objectively nothing but the essence of
feeling" (*B* 230). These comments fail to acknowledge
that, in *The Essence of Christianity*, Feuerbach had conceived
of God as an alienated projection of the human species-essence, which
was said to include *not only* feeling, but reason and will, as
well. They nevertheless reflect Feuerbach's generally overlooked
deployment against Hegel of resources derived from the philosophies of
feeling of Schleiermacher and
 Jacobi,[18]
 and they indicate the direction in which his thinking about religion
continued to move after the publication of *The Essence of
Christianity*, namely, away from an emphasis on
species-consciousness conceived along Hegelian lines, and toward what
Harvey has aptly referred to as the
"naturalist-existentialist" themes that predominate in his
later writings on religion (cf. Harvey 1995). These are discussed in
 Section 6
 below.


## 5. The "New" Philosophy



In notes for lectures on the history of modern philosophy that he
delivered in 1835/36, Feuerbach wrote that idealism is the "one
true philosophy", and that "what is not spirit is
*nothing*" (*VGP* 139). Around the same time, he
vigorously defended the "absolute method" employed by
Hegel in his *Logic* against its critics (*GW* 8:73).
Feuerbach himself referred to his early philosophical
"standpoint" as "the standpoint of pantheistic
identity" (*GW* 10:291). His efforts to extricate himself
from this standpoint were ongoing over the course of two decades. The
extent to which they ultimately succeeded is debatable. Whereas the
young Marx saw Feuerbach as "the true *conqueror of* the
*old philosophy*", the neo-Kantian historian of
materialism, F.A. Lange, could find in his "new"
philosophy only another iteration of the philosophy of spirit,
"which we encounter here in the form of a philosophy of
sensuousness" that lacks materialistic bona fides (Marx 1844:
80; Lange [1866] 1974: v. 2,
 522).[19]




In 1839, the same year that Feuerbach made his first public break with
Hegelianism in the essay, "Toward a Critique of the Hegelian
Philosophy", he was still able to write that he missed in
speculative philosophy "the element of the empirical, and in
empiricism the element of speculation", and to describe his own
method as an effort to conjoin both kinds of philosophical
"activity" into a form of "*skepticism* or
*critique* just as much of the *merely* speculative as
of the *merely* empirical" (*GW* 9:12). It was
only in 1842, between the time of the publication of the first (1841)
and second (1843) editions of *The Essence of Christianity*
(which happens also to have been a time of draconian censorship and
police surveillance) that Feuerbach became convinced of the need to
make a "radical break" with the speculative philosophical
 tradition.[20]
 This prompted him to report in the preface to the second edition of
his famous book that "the Idea" retained for him only a
practical significance as "faith in the historical future"
and in the triumph of truth and virtue. In the realm of theoretical
philosophy proper, and "in complete opposition to the Hegelian
philosophy," he now considered himself a realist and a
materialist (*WC* 15).



In two brief philosophical manifestos published in 1842 and 1843,
respectively, Feuerbach sought to "deduce", through an
internal criticism of the "old" philosophy (culminating in
the Hegelian system), the "principles"
(*Grundsatze*) that would lay the foundation for a
"new", naturalistic "philosophy of the
future". After the publication of these two manifestos, however,
he turned his attention back to religion, claiming in the foreword to
the first volume of his collected works (1846) that it was only in his
book on *The Essence of Faith According to Luther* (1844) that
he came to appreciate the "truth and essentiality of
sensuousness [*Sinnlichkeit*]" (*GW* 10:187), and
thereby to overcome the "contradiction" between
speculation and empiricism in which his position in *The Essence of
Christianity* had remained mired. It is certainly the case that a
number of concepts that are central to the philosophical anthropology
with which Feuerbach sought to replace the "old"
philosophy, including the effort to "naturalize freedom"
undertaken in his final writings, were first introduced and developed
in writings on religion published in the 1840s and 1850s. Because of
this, it's difficult to neatly separate a discussion of
Feuerbach's "new" philosophy from his later
theorizing about religion. Be that as it may, the first of these
topics will be explored in this section and the second in the
succeeding section. Feuerbach's preliminary efforts in his last
active years to develop a drive psychology and to naturalize ethics
will be considered briefly in the final section.



One thing that distinguishes Feuerbach's "new"
philosophy from other versions of modern empiricism and materialism is
his claim to have derived the "principles" of this
philosophy through a dialectical inversion of the Hegelian system. In
the "Theses" Feuerbach argues that, by
"positing" the human essence "outside of man"
in the ethereal realm of absolute spirit, the Hegelian philosophy
perpetuates the theological alienation of human beings from their own
essence, which he now explicitly equates with subjective spirit. The
re-appropriation of this abstracted essence by finite, corporeal human
subjects cannot be achieved "positively" [*auf positive
Weg*], but only through a "total negation" of the
Hegelian philosophy that will reveal once and for all the
incarnational telos of the history of philosophy and humanity
(*VT* 247). In this way, Feuerbach thinks, the hidden
"truth of Christianity" (*VT* 263) will finally be
realized in the form of an atheistic humanism that renounces the
fantastical consolations of religion in order to embrace the
historical tasks of human self-realization and the creation of new
political and cultural institutions that will be conducive to it.



In 1846, Feuerbach published a number of "fragments" from
his unpublished papers intended to document the course of his
philosophical development. One of these fragments, entitled
"Doubt", and dated 1827-28 (which is the time when
Feuerbach was writing his doctoral dissertation) seems already to
anticipate Feuerbach's later critique of Hegel. In this
fragment, we find him questioning the transition from the first to the
second part of Hegel's tripartite philosophical system, i.e.,
the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature. The
conceptual process traced by Hegel in the Logic, whereby the
categories of thought are successively deduced from one another, is
driven by the negativity of the logical determinations of each of
these categories, until the process culminates in the absolute Idea.
But what negativity remains within the absolute Idea to propel the
transition from thought to being, Feuerbach wonders, unless it is that
the purportedly "absolute" Idea remains unrealized, and
hence incomplete, until it becomes incarnate in the realm of the
sensuous, i.e., nature? In that case, however, nature itself (as the
realm of the sensuous) is the hidden truth of the Idea.



The speculative claim for the identity of thought and being was the
cornerstone of the Hegelian philosophy in which Feuerbach finds the
"old" philosophy perfected. One of the principal
"theses" of the new philosophy is its repudiation of this
claim. Feuerbach argues that, because the concept of pure being with
which Hegel begins the *Logic* is an abstraction, in the end
Hegel succeeds only in reconciling thought with the thought of being,
rather than with being itself, which is the "other" of
thought. The new philosophy affirms that being is distinct from, and
prior to, thought, and that it is as various as is the panoply of
individually existing beings, from which it cannot be intelligibly
distinguished.



> 
> 
> Thought comes from being, but being does not come from thought.
> [...] The essence of being *as being* [i.e., in contrast
> to the mere *thought* of being] is the essence of nature.
> (*VT* 258/168)
> 
> 
> 



To say that something exists in actuality is to say that it exists not
only as a figment of someone's imagination, or as a mere
determination of their consciousness, but for itself, independently of
consciousness. "Being is something in which not only I but also
others, above all also the object itself, participate"
(*GPZ* 304/40). In affirming the distinction between thought
and being, repudiating Hegel's critique of sense certainty, and
affirming the claim that nature exists through itself, independently
of thought, the new philosophy also affirms the reality of time and
space, insisting that real existence is finite, determinate, corporeal
existence. Whereas, in his lectures on logic and metaphysics, and in
his writings from the mid-1830's, Feuerbach had defended the
Hegelian method of the logical *Entwicklung* or development of
the various moments of the absolute Idea, he now argues that the
concept of development entails or presupposes temporality, so that a
non-temporal developmental process is a contradiction in terms. If
speculative philosophy is the philosophy of the infinite, the new
philosophy aims to disclose the truth of finitude by reversing the
path taken by speculation from the infinite to the finite, and from
the indeterminate to the determinate (*VT* 249).



Although, in the "Theses", Feuerbach refers to
"speculative philosophy" as having been inaugurated by
Spinoza, revived by Schelling, and perfected by Hegel (*VT*
243), in *Principles* he locates the origin of this tradition
in the Cartesian philosophy, and specifically in "the
abstraction from the sensuous [*Sinnlichkeit*], from
matter" (*GPZ* 275/ 13) through which the conception of
the cogito first arose. Much of the content of *Principles*
consists of a truncated survey of the history of modern philosophy
that purports to trace, through several dialectical inversions, a
necessary development from the rationalistic theism of Descartes and
Leibniz through the pantheism of Spinoza to the idealism of Kant and
Fichte, culminating in Hegel's philosophy of identity. What this
survey is primarily intended to show is that the fundamental tendency
of this development has been toward the actualization and humanization
of God or, alternatively, toward



> 
> 
> the *divinization* of the *real*, of the *materially
> existent*--of materialism, empiricism, realism,
> humanism--[and] the negation of theology. (*GPZ* 285/
> 22)
> 
> 
> 



This survey is followed by a short "demonstration" of the
historical necessity of the new philosophy, which takes the form of a
critique of Hegel, and by the enumeration of several doctrines that
distinguish the new philosophy from the old.



Whereas earlier rationalists had conceived of God as existing prior
to, and independently of, nature, and as possessing perfect knowledge
untainted by materiality; and had, further, "placed the effort
and labor of abstraction and of self-liberation from the sensuous only
in themselves", Feuerbach views Hegel as having been the first
to transform "this subjective activity into the self-activity of
the divine being." Thus, for Hegel, like the heroes of pagan
antiquity, God (or the Idea) must "fight through virtue for his
divinity", and only comes to be for himself (or itself) at the
end of a lengthy and laborious process (*GPZ* 296/32). This
process, as it is described by Hegel at the end of the *Science of
Logic*, involves the logical Idea



> 
> 
> *freely releas*[*ing*] itself ... [into] the
> *externality of space and time* existing absolutely on its own
> without the moment of subjectivity. (Hegel [1812-1816] 1969:
> 843)
> 
> 
> 



What Feuerbach refers to as "the liberation of the absolute from
matter" is achieved as spirit gradually distinguishes itself
from nature before attaining to the awareness of itself as absolute.
Here, Feuerbach notes, "matter is indeed posited in God, that
is, it is posited as God", and to posit matter as God is to
affirm atheism and materialism, but insofar as the
self-externalization of the Idea in nature is superseded in the course
of the coming-to-be-for-itself of the Idea in the forms of subjective,
objective and absolute spirit, this negation of "theology"
(i.e., of God conceived as an immaterial being distinct from nature)
is negated in turn. This is what Feuerbach seems to have in mind when
he refers to Hegel's philosophy as



> 
> 
> the last magnificent attempt to restore Christianity, which was lost
> and wrecked, through philosophy ... by identifying it with the
> negation of Christianity. (*GPZ* 297/34)
> 
> 
> 



The new philosophy categorically affirms the embodied nature of human
subjectivity and self-consciousness. Whereas the old philosophy
conceived of the cogito as "an abstract and merely a thinking
being to whose essence the body does not belong" (*GPZ*
319-320/ 54), the new philosophy affirms that, as a thinking
subject, "I am a real, sensuous being and, indeed, the body in
its totality is my ego, my essence itself" (ibid.). Although it
is not entirely clear just what Feuerbach could mean in claiming that
"the body in its totality is my ego", elsewhere he says
that to affirm that the ego is corporeal "has no other meaning
than that the ego is not only active but also passive ... [and
that] the passivity of the ego is the activity of the object" in
such a way that "the object belongs to the innermost being of
the ego" (*AP* 150/142). Object and ego are thus, to use
a Heideggerian term, *gleichursprunglich* or
"equiprimordial".



> 
> 
> It is through the body that the ego is not just an ego but also an
> object. To be embodied is to be in the world; it means to have so many
> senses, i.e., so many pores and naked surfaces. The body is nothing
> but the porous ego. (*AP* 151/143)
> 
> 
> 



If philosophical thought is to avoid remaining "a prisoner of
the ego", Feuerbach insists, it "must begin with its
*antithesis*, with its *alter ego*" (*AP*
146/138). The antithesis of thought is sensation. Whereas, in
thinking, it is the object that is determined by the thinking activity
of the subject, in sense experience, Feuerbach insists (without much
argument and with apparently little concern for problems that
preoccupied the British empiricists and Kant), the consciousness of
the subject is determined by the activity of the object. The object
can thus be said to function as a subject in its own right. What makes
it possible for the ego to posit the object is only that, in positing
the object as something distinct from itself, the ego is at the same
time posited by the object. If, however, the



> 
> 
> the object is not only something posited, but also (to continue in
> this abstract language) something which itself posits, then it is
> clear that the presuppositionless ego, which excludes the object from
> itself and negates it, is only a presupposition of the subjective ego
> against which the object must protest. (*AP* 147/ 139)
> 
> 
> 



It is not to the I, but to the not-I within the I, that real, sensuous
objects are given. Memory is what first enables us to transform
objects of sense experience into objects of thought, so that what is
no longer present to the senses can nevertheless be recalled to
consciousness. In doing so, it allows us to transcend the limitations
of time and space in thought, and to construct, from a multitude of
distinct sense experiences, a conception of the universe as a whole,
and of our relations to the various other beings that exist in it.
Feuerbach continues to affirm that, unlike the animals,
"man" is a universal, cosmopolitan being. However, he now
maintains that we need not ascribe to human beings any unique
supersensible faculty in order to affirm this truth, since



> 
> 
> wherever a sense is elevated above the limits of particularity and its
> bondage to needs, it is elevated to an independent and theoretical
> significance and dignity; universal sense is intelligence
> [*Verstand*]; universal sensibility, mentality
> [*Geistigkeit*]. (*GPZ* 336/69)
> 
> 
> 



What distinguishes humans from non-human animals is thus not our
possession of non-natural powers, either of reason or volition, but
the fact that human beings are "absolute sensualists"
whose collective powers of observation and recollection extend, in
principle, to the whole of nature.


## 6. The Later Theory of Religion



Feuerbach is most often associated with the slogan underlying *The
Essence of Christianity*, according to which "theology is
anthropology" (insofar as the predicates attributed by
Christians to God are in fact predicates of the human
species-essence). In a number of works on religion published in the
1840s and 1850s, however, Feuerbach advanced explanations of the
origin of religious concepts and beliefs that are strikingly different
from, and apparently at odds with, the more familiar position put
forward in that book. The works in which Feuerbach advanced these new
theoretical initiatives include the previously referenced Luther book
(1844), a short book entitled *The Essence of Religion* (1846),
the essay, "Belief in Immortality from the Standpoint of
Anthropology" (1847), the *Lectures on the Essence of
Religion* originally delivered in 1848-9, but first
published in 1851 (hereafter *Lectures*), and the
*Theogony* (1857). The question of the relationship between the
account of religion contained in *The Essence of Christianity*
and the views put forward in these later writings is a complex one.
The most thorough investigation of this question is to be found in
Harvey (1995), where Harvey distinguishes five different
"explanatory principles" employed by Feuerbach in *The
Essence of Christianity*, among which he divides those that are
conceived along Hegelian lines from those that tend instead toward the
"existentialist-naturalist" themes which predominate in
Feuerbach's later writings on religion (Harvey 1995:
68-69). Harvey's thesis is that, in his later writings,
Feuerbach in fact develops an alternative, bipolar model of religion
that is both incompatible with, and more compelling than, the more
familiar theory presented in *The Essence of Christianity*.
Whereas, in that work, Feuerbach had proposed that God is an alienated
projection of the human species-essence to whom the
"perfections" of the latter are mistakenly attributed, the
new bipolar model seeks instead to explain the origin and persistence
of religious beliefs and practices, Christian and non-Christian alike,
in terms of their role in meeting deep-seated psychological needs
resulting from the contingency and finitude of embodied human subjects
seeking to preserve their existence and to expand their natural
powers.



In a previously cited essay published in 1842, in which Feuerbach
sought to clarify the differences between Hegel's philosophy of
religion and his own, he referred readers seeking to evaluate his
argument in *The Essence of Christianity* to his
"Critique of the So-Called Positive Philosophy", published
in the *Halle Annals* in December, 1838 (*B* 235). It
was there that Feuerbach first put forward the claim that all the
"determinations" (*Bestimmungen*) ascribed by the
positive philosophy to God are determinations either of "the
essence of nature" or of "the essence of man"
(*KPP* 204). This claim is consistent with subsequent
statements of Feuerbach's, including his observation in
*Principles* that "God, in the theological sense, is God
only as long as he is conceived as a being distinguished from the
being of man and nature" (*GPZ* 280/19). Here the
suggestion seems to be that, if it can be shown that attributes
ascribed by theists to God are attributes derived either from human
consciousness or from nature, then it will have been shown that God
has no existence apart from the existence of human consciousness and
of nature. Thus, even if it is true, as Harvey is probably correct to
argue, that the bipolar model of religion found in the later writings
does not merely supplement, but replaces, the position taken by
Feuerbach in *The Essence of Christianity*, these two distinct
explanatory enterprises can nevertheless be understood as alternative
strategies for making good on Feuerbach's original claim that
the predicates of divinity can be reduced to predicates derived
*either* from the essence of nature or from the human essence.
It should be noted that, while Harvey is correct in pointing out that
the human species-essence is rarely mentioned in Feuerbach's
later writings, by 1851 Feuerbach had nevertheless still not abandoned
the claim that God, conceived as a personal being distinct from
nature, "is nothing other than the deified and objectified
spiritual essence of man" (*VWR* 28/21).



As Rawidowicz (1964: 113) and Ascheri (1964: 62) have both observed,
the break with the speculative tradition that Feuerbach signaled in
the "Preliminary Theses" and in *Principles*
corresponds to a noticeable change in his stance toward religion, if
not in his estimation of the truth-value of traditional doctrinal
claims. In his polemical essays of the late 1830s, and in *The
Essence of Christianity*, Feuerbach had unfavorably contrasted the
"egoistic", practical standpoint of religion, which he
associated with the unrestricted subjectivity of feeling
(*Gemut*) and imagination (*Phantasie*), with the
impartial, theoretical standpoint of philosophy, which he associated
with reason and objectivity. At the end of *Principles*,
however, he informs his readers that the new philosophy, without
ceasing to be theoretical, nevertheless has a fundamentally practical
tendency, and that in this respect it "assumes the place of
religion" and "is in truth itself religion"
(*GPZ* 341/73). This line of thought is developed somewhat
further in an unpublished manuscript where Feuerbach observes that, in
order to replace religion, philosophy must itself become religion in
the sense that "it must, in a way suited to its own nature,
incorporate the essence of religion or the advantage that religion
possesses over philosophy" (*NV* 123/148). Here,
Feuerbach does not say what he takes religion's
"advantage" over philosophy to be, but in the
*Lectures* he claims that the difference between philosophy and
religion can be reduced to "the simple statement that religion
is sensuous and aesthetic, while philosophy is nonsensuous and
abstract" (*VWR* 20/13). Religion's
"advantage" over the old philosophy, then, is presumably
it's implicit acknowledgment of the "truth and
essentiality of sensuousness" and of human finitude, which it is
the task of the new philosophy to articulate explicitly.



When Feuerbach's Luther book was first published in 1844, its
subtitle suggested that it was conceived of as an addendum to *The
Essence of Christianity*. Because, in the first edition of that
book, Feuerbach had relied heavily on quotations from patristic and
medieval works to support his claims, some theological critics had
retorted that, while Feuerbach's account of Christianity might
apply to Catholicism, it did not apply to Protestantism. It was in
responding to these critics that Feuerbach turned his attention to
Luther, and, in doing so, introduced a number of concepts and themes
that had not figured prominently in *The Essence of
Christianity*, but which he continued to develop in his later
writings, including both those devoted to religion, as well as those
devoted to other topics. Foremost among these concepts and themes are
*Seligkeit* (blessedness or perfect happiness) and the
*Gluckseligkeitstrieb* or drive-to-happiness; "human
egoism" or human self-love; the feeling of dependence on nature;
and the powerful, theogonic (i.e., god-originating) wish to be free
from the limitations of nature by which the human drive-to-happiness
is restricted.



Feuerbach begins the Luther book by conceding that no doctrine would
seem more clearly to contradict the central claim advanced in *The
Essence of Christianity*, namely, that Christians worship the
human species-essence, than does Luther's doctrine. That
doctrine seems, on the contrary, to be the epitome of human
self-abnegation insofar as it emphasizes the depravity and
contemptibleness of human nature in contrast to the perfection and
glory of the divine nature. This appearance, however, is deceptive, on
Feuerbach's account; for, while it's true that, whatever
Luther takes from human beings, he gives to God, since all that
belongs to God belongs to Christ, and all that belongs to Christ
belongs to the Christian, it is only on the surface that
Luther's doctrine is dehumanizing. Whereas, in *The Essence
of Christianity*, Feuerbach had contrasted the egoism and
intolerance of faith (which he associated with the false, theological
essence of religion) with the altruism and universality love (which he
associated with the true, human essence of religion), in the Luther
book he emphasizes instead that Christian faith is faith in a God who
is love. Since, however, it is human beings who are the principal
object of this love, Luther's emphasis on the comptemptability
of human nature turns out to be an indirect form of human self-love or
self-affirmation. The Christian believer affirms the existence of, as
well as his or her confidence in, the goodness of God, who has
promised him or her blessedness or freedom from the painful
limitations of mortality. It is only because the Christian believer
thus "completes and satisfies himself in God"
(*WGL* 363/46) that God is credited with the possession of all
that human beings lack. Luther, with his emphasis on God's being
*pro nobis* or "for us", was "the first to
let out the secret of the Christian faith" (*WGL*
366/50), which is, at bottom, the assurance



> 
> 
> that God is by his very nature concerned with man, ... that God
> is a being not for himself or against us, but rather for us, a good
> being, *good to us men*. (*WGL* 366-67/51)
> 
> 
> 



From this recognition, Feuerbach goes on to develop an analysis of the
divine attributes, which he interprets in this context as "means
to the end of benevolence" (*WGL* 368/52). Here, and in
Feuerbach's later writings, the concepts of blessedness and the
drive-to-happiness seem to play a role analogous to the one played by
the concept of the species-essence in *The Essence of
Christianity*. Whereas, in the latter work, divine attributes such
as omniscience and perfection were said to be attributes of the human
species-essence, in the section on *Seligkeit* toward the end
of the *Theogony*, where Feuerbach develops a line of thought
first introduced in the Luther book, many of these same attributes are
said to characterize the state of blessedness itself. "God is
only the foreword, blessedness the text of Christianity. Or: The
mystery of divinity is first unveiled and revealed in the gospel of
blessedness" (*T* 308). The thesis here is that the
attributes of the Christian God are determined by the most fundamental
wishes of the Christian believer. For example, God *qua*
creator is first and foremost omnipotent, but omnipotence is ascribed
to God only because it is necessary for God to be omnipotent in order
for God to be able to exercise his benevolence toward the faithful by
supplying them with what they lack, including eternal life. There is
no lack that cannot be satisfied, and no ultimate harm that can
befall, the person who is the object of the benevolence of an
omnipotent being. On this account, the divine attributes are
determined by human needs. These are determined, in turn, by the
psycho-physical constitution of human beings as self-conscious
subjects constrained by natural limitations from which they have an
urgent wish to be liberated. In the final analysis, belief in divine
omnipotence is said be motivated, not by any specific wish, but rather
by "the unspecific over-all wish that there be in general no
natural necessity; no limitations, no opposition to the human being
and to human wishes" (*WGL* 372/59).



Feuerbach, whose conception of *Seligkeit* or blessedness seems
to have been influenced by Augustine's account of
*felicitas* in *The City of God*, defines blessedness at
one point as freedom from sin, sensual drives, "the oppression
of matter", death, and the limitations of nature in general
(*WGL* 403/103). Whereas the God of Christianity had previously
been identified by Feuerbach as an alienated projection of the human
species-essence, here God is defined instead as the realized
drive-to-happiness of the Christian believer. To say that belief in
God is motivated or caused by the human drive-to-happiness is not
necessarily to deny that attributes ascribed to God are attributes
derived from human nature. It is, however, in any case to affirm that
the ascription to God of the perfections of the human species-essence
serves an underlying psychological need that is itself determined by
the dependence of human beings upon nature, and their awareness of
this dependence in the form of powerful hopes and fears that give rise
to belief in supernatural agencies and efforts to secure their
blessings.



Two years after the publication of the Luther book, Feuerbach
published another short book entitled *The Essence of
Religion*, the core ideas in which are further developed in the
*Lectures*. Here, Feuerbach explains that, because Christians
themselves do not worship such things as the sun and the moon, but
instead worship "will, intelligence, consciousness as divine
beings and powers" (*VWR* 27/20), he himself had
"disregarded nature" in his account of Christianity
(*VWR*, 26/19). This had given rise to certain unspecified but
"preposterous" misunderstandings which he sought to
correct by augmenting the slogan encapsulating his doctrine from
"theology is anthropology" to "theology is
anthropology '*and physiology*'"
(*VWR* 28/21). This modification reflects a new emphasis in
Feuerbach's later writings on the ontological dependence of
human consciousness upon the physical human organism, which itself
exists only in relation to the natural order of which it is a
part--a relation mediated, or, to be more precise,
*revealed*, by the senses.



*The Essence of Religion* begins with the striking claims that
1) the feeling of dependence is the "ground" of religion,
and that 2) the original object of this feeling, i.e., in the history
of religion, is nature. Feuerbach defines the feeling of dependence
as



> 
> 
> the feeling or consciousness of man that he does not and cannot exist
> apart from a being that is distinct from himself, that he does not
> have himself to thank for his own existence. (*WR* 4)
> 
> 
> 



This feeling can manifest itself negatively as fear, to which
Feuerbach refers at one point as "a feeling of dependency on an
object without which I am nothing, which has the power to destroy
me" (*VWR* 39/31); but the feeling of dependent can also
manifest itself positively in the form of celebratory joy and
exaltation. Feuerbach finds both of these powerful emotions expressed
in the act of sacrifice, which he takes to be the most characteristic
practice of nature religions (as opposed, presumably, to prayer as the
characteristic act of "spiritual", i.e., monotheistic,
religions). In addition to filling a "gap" in the argument
put forward in *The Essence of Christianity* by emphasizing the
dependence of "the human essence" upon "the essence
of nature", Feuerbach also sought in *The Essence of
Religion* to identify features shared in common by what he calls
"nature religions", on the one hand, and
"spiritual" religions like Christianity, on the other, and
to clarify the relationship between these two kinds of religion.
Feuerbach uses the term "nature religion" to refer both
the pagan religions of classical antiquity, and the religions of
various tribal peoples whose beliefs and practices were described for
Feuerbach and his contemporaries by European travelers in journals
such as *Das Ausland*, from which Feuerbach derived a number of
the examples to which he refers in this book (cf. Tomasoni 1990:
10-11, 127-135).



While the feeling of dependence is said to be the "ground"
of religion, what the act of sacrifice aims at, or seeks to achieve,
is freedom from the restrictions of nature, or, alternatively, human
independence. If blessedness is the condition of not being subjected
to the restrictions imposed by nature on all finite, corporeal
individuals subject to generation and corruption, then human
blessedness can be regarded as the final goal (*Endzweck*) of
religion (*WR* 34). The gods are the objects of worship, and
the recipients of sacrifice, because they are the benefactors of human
beings in the specific sense that they are imagined to have it in
their power to satisfy fundamental human wishes, including the wish
not to die. "Only a being who loves man and desires his
happiness [*Seligkeit*] is an object of human worship, of
religion" (*VWR* 71/60). The sacrificial act is motivated
by the experience of need (*Bedurfnis*), which involves
the simultaneous awareness both of one's "non-being apart
from nature", and of one's existence as a self-conscious
being distinct from nature (*WR* 32). In the *Lectures*,
Feuerbach claims that the feeling of dependence on nature is the only
"truly universal" designation for the "psychological
or subjective ground of religion" (*VWR* 39/31). This
continues to be the case even after nature has ceased to be the locus
of divinity, and the origin of the visible world is sought in the will
of a transcendent creator who brought forth the world into being from
nothing, and who is solely responsible for occurrences attributed by
polytheists to a multitude of divine agencies. The objective
correlates of the feeling of dependence, in the case of both
polytheism and monotheism, are the really existing things and people
who are the objects of various human needs, physical and
psychological, at least some of which Feuerbach implicitly recognizes,
especially in the *Theogony*, to be culturally determined.



Feuerbach's description of the feeling of dependence as
involving the awareness



> 
> 
> that I am nothing without a *not-I* which is distinct from me
> yet intimately related to me, something *other*, which is at
> the same time my *own* being (*VWR* 350/311)
> 
> 
> 



reflects his understanding of nature as the totality of "the
beings [*Wesen*], things, [and] objects that man distinguishes
from himself and his products" (*WR* 4). Nature, in other
words, is coterminous with the non-human world, devoid of
consciousness, will and sentiment. It includes such things as light,
electricity, air, water, earth, and the plants and animals upon which
the existence of human beings depends, but it also includes the human
organism itself insofar as the effects produced by that organism are
produced unconsciously and involuntary. Nature is the "cause and
ground of man"; in human beings nature "becomes a
personal, conscious, intelligent (*verstandiges*)
being" (*VWR* 29/21). To say that human beings are
dependent upon nature is to say, among other things, that nature,
which is devoid of consciousness and intention, is what has caused
human beings to exist, and that the same physical processes that have
produced the human brain have also produced human consciousness. While
all organisms are dependent upon nature for their existence, human
beings are distinguished from other organisms by the extent of their
conscious awareness of this dependence. This awareness Feuerbach finds
expressed in the earliest forms of cultic activity, including the
earliest forms of nature religion focused, for example, on the changes
of the seasons, and in the offering of sacrifice to divine beings
associated with various aspects of the natural world. Although nature
is the original object of religion, this goes unrecognized initially
because human beings do not at first distinguish themselves from
nature or vice versa. The forces of nature are instead personified,
and naturally occurring events are attributed to the human-like
motivations of spirits and gods. Religion, according to Feuerbach,
exhibits the following contradiction: When it conceives of itself
theistically, it mistakenly thinks of God as a thoroughly non-human
being (i.e., one whose existence and attributes in no way depends on
the existence and attributes of human beings), and when in conceives
of itself as nature religion, it mistakenly attributes consciousness
and will to what is in fact entirely non-human.



Further analysis of the feeling of the dependence leads Feuerbach to
conclude that this feeling itself presupposes "egoism as the
ultimate hidden ground of religion" (*VWR*
91-92/79). Here he reasons that, if human beings were not
subject to powerful psychological drives which compel them to expand
and develop their natural powers, including most fundamentally the
drive-to-self-preservation, they would not experience the limitations
imposed upon them by nature as painful and restricting.
"*Life* is *egoism*" (*EEWR* 82)
insofar as the fundamental drive of all living things, including the
human organism, is the drive to self-preservation
(*Selbsterhaltungstrieb*). Nevertheless, what Feuerbach calls
"human egoism" doesn't seem to be the same thing
either as psychological egoism (the claim that everyone always acts
from self-interest) or ethical egoism (the claim that
"good" is whatever serves my own interests). Feuerbach
writes that, by "human egoism" he means



> 
> 
> man's love for himself, that is, love of the human essence, the
> love that spurs him on to satisfy and develop all the impulses and
> tendencies without whose satisfaction and development he neither is
> nor can be a true, complete human being. (*VWR*
> 60-61/50)
> 
> 
> 



This type of self-love, which warrants comparison with, but is not the
same as, Rousseau's *amour de soi*, encompasses love of
one's fellow human beings, apart from whom one cannot either
cultivate or satisfy the ethical, intellectual and aesthetic impulses
and capacities in which one's essential humanity consists, and
to whose well-being one's own is thus inextricably linked.



Feuerbach's book, *Theogony according to the Sources of
Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity* (1857), which is the
product of six years of close engagement with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin
texts from antiquity, exemplifies the vastness of Feuerbach's
humanistic erudition. Feuerbach considered it his "simplest,
most complete, mature work" (*GW* 20: 292). It may not be
a mere coincidence that the period of Feuerbach's engagement in
these philological labors was the same period when one of his closest
correspondents was Emil Ernst Gottfried von Herder, the son of Johann
Gottfried von Herder, whose introduction to the study of theology
Feuerbach had read as a young man while he himself was learning Hebrew
grammar in preparation for his matriculation in the theological
faculty at the University of Heidelberg. Like the older Herder, who
conceived of the poetry of the Hebrew Bible as a product of the genius
of humanity in its childhood, Feuerbach turned to the *Iliad*
and the *Odyssey*, which he thought of as the
*Urstatten* or "original sites" of
anthropology, and to the Hebrew scriptures, for clues to the origins
of belief in the gods and in God. Large portions of the book consist
either of 1) careful philological analyses of individual passages
selected, for example, from the *Iliad* or the
*Odyssey*, or from the creation accounts in Genesis, or else of
a verse from Pindar or Ovid, or a passage from the New Testament; or
2) quotations from a wide range of Greco-Roman, patristic, rabbinical
and medieval sources which Feuerbach cites in support of the central
explanatory claim of the book. This claim is that the psychological
origin of belief in the gods and in God is the powerful human wish for
happiness or blessedness conceived as a state of freedom from the
"limitations" (*Grenze*) that nature imposes on
human existence, which are experienced by the human subject in the
form of powerful feelings of hope and fear.



In seeking to substantiate the claim that the wish is the fundamental
religious phenomenon, Feuerbach analyzes several theophanies from the
*Iliad* in an effort to show that the gods make their
appearances in the epic in response to petitions directed to them by
humans. Insofar as the ends toward which the actions of the gods in
the Homeric epics are directed are determined by the wishes of the
mortals who invoke their blessings and curses, the gods act as the
representatives or deputies of (*Vertreter*) of human self-love
(*T* 12). "The wish is a slave of necessity, but a slave
with the will to freedom" (*T* 47), and the gods are the
imaginary embodiment of human freedom from the restrictions of
finitude. Feuerbach arrives at this conclusion through his analysis of
acts of petitionary prayer in the *Iliad* and their role in
wish fulfillment, and cites in this context the observation of the
Byzantine Homeric commentator, Eustathius of Thessalonica, that Homer
allows no just request made of the gods to remain unfulfilled. In the
divine-human relationship, it is the mortals who desire, strive, and
will; and it is the gods who complete or bring to fruition these human
intentions to the extent that the conditions for their satisfaction
are beyond human control (*T* 19). While the wish itself is a
purely subjective psychological occurrence, the completion of the
action to which a wish might give rise, or the achievement of the end
toward which the wish is directed, depends upon external circumstances
that may or may not be conducive to the fulfillment of the wish.
Anticipating a similar observation more famously made by the
pioneering field anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, it is under
such circumstances, where failure is a distinct possibility, and a
matter of urgency hangs in the balance, that the gods are invoked and
their blessings sought in order to bring some human endeavor to a
successful completion. The gods are beings who are able to do or know
what humans would like to be able to do or know, but cannot
(*T* 39).



Religion, on this account, does not originate, as philosophy does,
from a theoretical or speculative impulse to understand the world, but
rather from a practical concern to influence the course of events that
transpire within it. Belief in gods thus presupposes a desire that
there should exist beings capable of guaranteeing the success of human
endeavors, and faith is preceded by hope in the logical order of
things religious. If human beings did not have a powerful desire, say,
to be liberated from bondage or to avoid death, belief in the Promised
Land or in immortality would never have arisen. In biblical terms,
faith in God is trust in what God promises, but what is promised by
God is what is sought after or desired by human beings. The religious
significance of God's promises is contingent upon their
correspondence to deep-seated human desires. Whereas, in *The
Essence of Religion*, Feuerbach referred to the feeling of
dependence as the "ground" of religion, he now attributes
the psychological origin of the gods to the wish. The wish, considered
as an act of striving for what remains beyond the limits of human
power to achieve, is theogonic in the sense that theophanies (i.e.,
manifestations of the gods or of God) described in the Homeric epics
and in the Bible, considered as narrative events, occur as responses
to powerful human wishes or needs, or else as expressions of gratitude
and celebration in response to occasions where these needs are
believed to have been met through the cooperation or assistance of a
divine agency (*T* 32). The gods owe their existence to
"sensualism and materialism" insofar as they are the
product of the material needs of finite, embodied human subjects.



Interesting sections of the *Theogony* are devoted to analyzing
the role of the gods in the consecration of oaths, and to the origins
of conscience in the aggrieved will-to-happiness of the other.
Feuerbach attributes belief in divine justice to the wish that the
person by whom one has been harmed should suffer harm themselves
(*T* 103). He appeals to the mythological representations of
the furies and of Medusa as evidence of the "sensual"
origins of the voice of conscience (*T* 136), which presupposes
a powerful, involuntary sense of sympathy with the suffering of person
who has suffered, or stands to suffer from, one's actions. It is
"only in his egoism that man has a criterion for distinguishing
between right and writing" (*T* 140). At one point in the
*Theogony* Feuerbach defines morality (*Sittlichkeit*)
as "the drive-to-happiness endowed with wisdom, the wise,
rational, healthy, normal, justified (*gerechte*)
self-love" (*T* 82).



When human beings in the course of their history acquire new and
different wishes, they tend also to worship new and different
divinities. Whereas the ancient Greco-Roman pagans, and even the
ancient Hebrews, were mainly concerned to secure blessedness in the
form of long life and temporal prosperity, the early Christians sought
their blessedness in eternity or "eternal life". Feuerbach
closely associates this shift from a concern with temporal blessedness
to a concern with eternal blessedness with the Christian emphasis on
creation ex nihilo, which he contrasts both with the Hebrew account of
creation as involving the forming and ordering of pre-existent
elements, and the limitation of the Greco-Roman gods to being able to
prolong the lives of mortals, and securing their blessedness in this
life, without being able to confer immortality upon them. The freedom
from natural necessity ascribed by early Christian thinkers to God is
interpreted by Feuerbach as an expression of the wish of these
Christians to be free themselves from the constraints of material
existence.


## 7. The Naturalization of Ethics in Feuerbach's Last Writings



As noted in the preceding section, Feuerbach's espousal of
sensuousness coincides with a movement toward nominalism that is
reflected in a shift of emphasis from the human species to the
individual human being in his later works on religion. One way that
this shift shows itself is in a striking change in Feuerbach's
estimation of egoism. Among the many issues that remain unclear in
Feuerbach's later writings is what the expression "human
essence" can mean for him once he has abandoned the
species-ontology of his earlier writings and declared himself a
nominalist. That pivotal question aside, it is at least clear that in
*Principles*, and in his later writings on ethics, Feuerbach
continues to emphasize the importance of inter-subjectivity and of the
I-Thou relationship. However, these are no longer conceived in
idealistic terms, as they had been previously, including
Feuerbach's doctoral dissertation, where he had spoken of
thought as a species-activity in which the individual thinking subject
participates. In his later writings on ethics, Feuerbach continues to
affirm that human beings are essentially communal and dialogical
beings, both with respect to our cognitive and linguistic capacities,
and with respect to the range of moral sentiments we experience toward
one another, but the communality in which the human essence is
manifested is now said to be one that presupposes a real,
"sensible" distinction between I and Thou.



Undoubtedly, the central concept in Feuerbach's last works,
which include the essay, "On Spiritualism and Materialism,
Especially in Relation to the Freedom of the Will", as well as
an incomplete essay on ethics, is the concept of the
*Gluckseligkeitstrieb* or drive-to-happiness. Toward the
end of the *Preliminary Theses*, after affirming that all
science must be grounded in nature, and that doctrines not so grounded
remain purely "hypothetical", Feuerbach had gone on to
note that this is especially true of the doctrine of freedom, and he
had assigned to the new philosophy the task of "naturalizing
freedom" (*VT* 262/172). This is one of the tasks to
which he applies himself in "On Spiritualism and
Materialism", where he takes aim at
"supernaturalistic" philosophers, among whom he counts
Kant, Fichte and Hegel, who ascribe to human beings a noumenal or
universal will that is "independent of all natural laws and
natural causes and thus of all sensuous motivations
[*Triebfedern*]" (*SM* 54). In arguing that it is
possible for the will to be determined by the mere form of the moral
law, independently of any sensible inclination, Kant had identified
the will with pure practical reason. In doing so, Feuerbach argues, he
turned the will into a mere abstraction. For Feuerbach, it makes no
sense to speak of a timeless will devoid of a volitional impulse
directed toward some particular object.



The concepts of drive (*Trieb*), happiness, sensation and will
are closely interrelated in the account of agency that Feuerbach seeks
to develop in these last writings. Feuerbach regards sensation as the
"first condition of willing" (*M* 366), since
without sensation there is no pain or need or sense of lack against
which for the will to strive to assert itself. At one point, he
defines happiness as the "healthy, normal" state of
contentment or wellbeing experienced by an organism that is able to
satisfy the needs and drives that are constitutive of its
"individual, characteristic nature and life" (*M*
366). The drive-to-happiness is a drive toward the overcoming of a
multitude of painful limitations by which the finite, corporeal
subject is afflicted. These can include social conditions involving
"political brutality and despotism" (*VWR* 61/50).
Every particular drive is a manifestation of the drive-to-happiness,
and the different individual drives are named after the different
objects in which people seek their happiness (*SM* 70). Among
the specific drives to which Feuerbach refers in his later writings
are the drive-to-self-preservation, the sexual drive, the
drive-to-enjoyment, the drive-to-activity and the drive-to-knowledge.
Although he does not explicitly associate drives with the unconscious,
Feuerbach does anticipate Nietzsche and Freud in regarding the body as
the "ground" of both the will and of consciousness
(*SM* 153), and he emphasizes that action results from the
force with which a dominant drive succeeds in subduing other
conflicting drives that may reassert themselves under altered
circumstances (*SM* 91). Feuerbach also occasionally
distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy drives, though he has
little to say about the standard or criterion he uses for making such
a distinction.



Whereas happiness involves the experience of a sense of contentment on
the part of a being that is able to satisfy the drives that are
characteristic of its nature, the inability to satisfy these drives
results in various forms of discontent, aggravation, pain and
frustration. The German word, "*Widerwille*", means
disgust or repugnance, but literally it involves not-wanting or,
etymologically, "willing against", and this, Feuerbach
contends, is the most rudimentary form of willing.



> 
> 
> Every malady (*Ubel*), every unsatisfied drive, every
> unassuaged longing, every sense of absence [i.e., of a desired object]
> is an irritating or stimulating injury and negation of the
> drive-to-happiness innate in each living and sensing being, and the
> countervailing affirmation of the drive-to-happiness, accompanied by
> representations and consciousness, is what we call "will".
> (*M* 367)
> 
> 
> 



Freedom of the will, as Feuerbach conceives of it here, is freedom
from the evils (*Ubeln*) by which my drive-to-happiness is
restricted, and is contingent upon the availability to me of the
specific means required for overcoming these restrictions.



Another way that Feuerbach seeks to "naturalize freedom"
is by developing a naturalistic account of conscience according to
which the voice of conscience, which imposes restrictions on my own
drive-to-happiness, functions in doing so as the advocate for the
drive-to-happiness of "the I apart from me, the sensuous
Thou" (*SM* 80), who has been or stands to be harmed by
those actions from which I can have a moral obligation to refrain from
performing. Where there is no harm or benefit, Feuerbach contends,
there is no criterion for distinguishing right from wrong (*SM*
75-76). Feuerbach agrees with Schopenhauer in regarding
compassion (*Mitleid*) as a basic source of moral motivation,
but rejects Schopenhauer's association of compassion with the
renunciation of the will to live. The purpose of morality and law is
to harmonize the drive-to-happiness of the various individual members
of a moral community.



> 
> 
> My right is the legal recognition of my own drive-to-happiness, my
> duty is the drive-to-happiness of the other that demands recognition
> from me. (*SM* 74)
> 
> 
> 



The moral will, as Feuerbach conceives of it here, is not a
disinterested will. It is rather "that will which seeks to cause
no harm because it wishes to suffer no harm" (*SM* 80),
and has come to identify its own interests with those of others.
Because sympathy for the suffering of others presupposes antipathy
toward my own suffering, whoever does away with self-interest (i.e.,
refuses to recognize moral value in actions motivated by
self-interest) does away at the same time with compassion
(*Mitleid*).