For a number of years in the mid-nineteenth century, Ludwig Feuerbach(1804–1872) played a pivotal role in the history ofpost-Hegelian German philosophy, and in the emergence of various formsof naturalism, materialism, and positivism that is one of the mostcharacteristic developments of this period (cf. Mandelbaum 1971:3–37 and Arndt & Jaeschke 2000). As a public intellectual inGermany during the decade that culminated in the revolutionaryuprising of 1848, Feuerbach embodied many of the democratic andprogressive aspirations that were frustrated by its eventual failure.Thereafter, during a decade of political reaction, he was aninspiration to such populizers of scientific materialism as Carl Vogt,Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner, whose role in thesecularization of modern culture in the second half of the nineteenthcentury was considerable (cf. Gregory 1977). By virtue of the enduringinfluence of his most famous book,The Essence ofChristianity, which was translated into English by George Eliot,Feuerbach has continued, since the beginning of the twentieth century,to attract the interest of theologians. The theological reception ofFeuerbach has been shaped to a considerable extent by the disputedcontention first expressed in the 1920s by the Neo-Orthodoxtheologian, Karl Barth, that Feuerbach’s atheistic account ofChristianity only brought to their most logically consistentconclusion the foundational premises of the liberal Protestanttheological enterprise inaugurated by Friedrich Schleiermacher at theoutset of the nineteenth century. This enterprise, which Barth and anumber of his contemporaries sought to repudiate, had, in the wake ofHume and Kant, shifted the starting point of theological reflectionfrom divine revelation and metaphysics to human religious experience.In the field of religious studies (as distinct from theology),Feuerbach is often considered to have produced a classical“projection” theory of religion. Such theories seek toidentify the underlying psychological and cognitive mechanisms thatgive rise to, and explain the persistence of, various religiousbeliefs and behaviors.^[1]

To the extent that Feuerbach is remembered today outside the contextof theology and religious studies, it is mainly as the object of KarlMarx’s criticism in his famousTheses on Feuerbach,originally penned in 1845, but first published posthumously byFriedrich Engels as an appendix to his book,Ludwig Feuerbach andthe End of Classical German Philosophy (Engels 1888). Thesetheses are often thought to represent the first cursory articulationof the theory that subsequently came to be known as historicalmaterialism. This theory began to be spelled out in more detail byMarx and Engels inThe German Ideology, a lengthy work inwhich they sought to distance themselves from their erstwhile YoungHegelian compatriots. Renewed philosophical attention paid toFeuerbach in the middle of the twentieth century is largelyattributable to the publication for the first time, beginning in thelate 1920s, of Marx’s early philosophical manuscripts, includingThe German Ideology, which revealed the extent ofFeuerbach’s influence on Marx and Engels during the periodculminating in its composition (1845–46).^[2] In 1870, two years prior to his death, after having studied the firstvolume of Marx’sCapital (1867), Feuerbach became amember of the Social Democratic Party, some financial support fromwhich helped him to survive the penury to which he and his family weresubjected toward the end of his life. Feuerbach’s funeralprocession in Nuremberg is said to have been attended by crowds wavingred banners, the symbol of the worker’s movement. Nevertheless,Feuerbach’s direct public influence and popularity as aphilosophical writer declined rapidly in the 1850s in approximatelyinverse proportion to the rising, albeit belated, influence ofSchopenhauer, whose spirit of pessimistic resignation was perhaps morein tune with the prevailing historical reality.

Apart from the influences outlined above, Feuerbach’s importancefor the history of modern philosophy is due to the fact that thepublication ofThe Essence of Christianity in 1841 can betaken, as it was by Engels, to symbolically mark the end of the periodof classical German philosophy that had begun sixty years earlier withthe appearance of Kant’sCritique of PureReason—though some might want to question the assumptioninvolved in this way of putting things that classical Germanphilosophy culminated in the Hegelian system that Engels thought ofFeuerbach as having overthrown.^[3] In any case, Feuerbach’s intellectual biography; his initiallydeep investment in, and subsequent effort to distance himself from,the Hegelian cause; and his attempt to inaugurate a new, sensualistic“philosophy of the future,” are all closely intertwinedwith political and intellectual developments in Germany during this period.^[4] Although Feuerbach ultimately failed to adequately develop theaphoristically formulated “principles” of the newphilosophy that he set out in 1843, the emphases in his later essayson corporeality, the senses, finitude, inter-subjectivity, and drivepsychology nevertheless succeeded in introducing into the history ofmodern European thought themes developed further by Marx, FriedrichNietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Max Scheler, Martin Buber, Karl Löwith,Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schmidt, among others.^[5]

• 1. Biographical Introduction
• 2. Early Idealistic Pantheism
• 3. Feuerbach as Historian of Philosophy
• 4. The Critique of Christianity
• 5. The “New” Philosophy
• 6. The Later Theory of Religion
• 7. The Naturalization of Ethics in Feuerbach’s Last Writings
• Bibliography
  • Feuerbach Works
  • Other References
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Biographical Introduction

Ludwig was the fourth son of the distinguished jurist, Paul JohannAnselm Ritter von Feuerbach. His nephew, the neo-classical painter,Anselm Feuerbach, was the son of Ludwig’s older brother, alsocalled Anselm, who was himself a classical archaeologist andaesthetician “in the spirit of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing andJohann Joachim Winckelmann”.^[6] Ludwig’s father, who studied philosophy and law at Jena in the1790s with the Kantians, Karl Reinhold and Gottlieb Hufeland,respectively, belonged to a group of distinguished northern Germanscholars called to Bavaria during the period of administrative reformunder Maximilian Montgelas and charged with the task of modernizingthe legal and educational institutions of what became in 1806 themodern kingdom of Bavaria. Other members of this group of so-calledNordlichter or “northern lights” included F.I.Niethammer, F.H. Jacobi (the godfather of Ludwig’s youngerbrother, Friedrich), and Friedrich Thiersch (the tutor ofLudwig’s two oldest brothers, who has sometimes been called“the Humboldt of Bavaria”). P.J.A. Feuerbach was knightedin recognition of his achievement in modernizing the Bavarian penalcode, though his political influence was dramatically curtailed as aresult of outspoken national-liberal criticisms of Napoleon expressedin pamphlets he published in 1813 and 1814 (cf. Tomasoni 2015:16–25).

Raised Protestant and religiously devout in his youth, Ludwigmatriculated in 1823 in the theological faculty of the University ofHeidelberg, where his father hoped he would come under the influenceof the late rationalist, H.E.G. Paulus. Ludwig was won over instead bythe speculative theologian, Karl Daub, who had been instrumental inbringing Hegel to Heidelberg for two years in 1816, and was by thistime one of the foremost theologians of the Hegelian school. By 1824,Ludwig had secured his father’s grudging permission to transferto Berlin under the pretext of wanting to study with the theologians,Friedrich Schleiermacher and August Neander, but in fact because ofhis growing infatuation with Hegel’s philosophy.Feuerbach’s matriculation at Berlin was delayed because ofsuspicions of his involvement in the politically subversive studentfraternity (Burschenschaft) movement, in which two of hisolder brothers were active, for which reason one of them (Karl, atalented mathematician) was imprisoned and subsequently attemptedsuicide. In 1825, to his father’s consternation, Ludwigtransferred to the philosophical faculty, thereafter hearing within atwo-year period all of Hegel’s lectures, except for those onaesthetics, repeating the lectures on logic twice.^[7]

Feuerbach defended his Latin dissertation,De ratione, una,universali, infinita, at the University of Erlangen in 1828. Soonthereafter, he began to deliver lectures on the history of modernphilosophy at the same university, a bastion of theological andpolitical conservatism many of whose faculty were closely associatedwith the neo-Pietist Awakening. One colleague of Feuerbach’s atErlangen was Julius Friedrich Stahl, who would go on to become aleading theorist of conservatism, and was associated by Feuerbach withthe so-called “positive philosophy” of the late Schelling.Feuerbach imprudently appended to his first book,Thoughts onDeath and Immortality (1830, hereafterThoughts; seeSection 2 below), which was published anonymously, but to no avail, a number ofscathingly satirical and even vulgar couplets (Xenien)directed against the Pietists that effectively destroyed his prospectsfor an academic career.

During the 1830s, Feuerbach published three books on the history ofmodern philosophy, in addition to several essays and reviews. Theseinclude theHistory of Modern Philosophy from Bacon toSpinoza (1833),History of Modern Philosophy: Presentation,Development, and Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy (1837),andPierre Bayle: A Contribution to the History of Philosophy andHumanity (1838), none of which have been translated into English.^[8] The first won him the praise of Edward Gans and an invitation fromLeopold von Henning to contribute reviews to theAnnals forScientific Criticism, the principal journal of the Hegelianacademic establishment in Berlin. In these reviews, Feuerbach defendedthe Hegelian philosophy vigorously against critics such as KarlBachmann. Even after the publication of the works on Leibniz andBayle, however, his efforts to secure an academic appointment remainedunsuccessful. He was able for several decades to sustain his existenceas an independent scholar in the remote Frankish village of Bruckbergby virtue of his wife, Bertha Löw, having been partial heir of aporcelain factory located there, from a modest pension due to hisfather’s service to Bavaria, and from publishing royalties.

The event that precipitated the gradual dissolution of the Hegeliansynthesis of faith and knowledge (a process later referred tosardonically by Marx and Engels as the “putrefaction of absolutespirit”) was the publication in two volumes in 1835–36 ofD.F. Strauss’sLife of Jesus Critically Examined. Inthis controversial work, Strauss used the tools of historicalcriticism he had acquired from his Tübingen teacher, F.C. Baur,to develop a compelling argument for the historical unreliability ofthe accounts of the life of Jesus preserved in the canonical gospels.In a relatively brief “concluding dissertation” at the endof this lengthy work of biblical criticism, Strauss appealed toHegel’s philosophy in proposing to interpret the doctrine of theincarnation of Christ as a mythological expression of thephilosophical truth of the identity of the divine spirit and the humanspecies (conceived as the community of finite spirits existingthroughout history, and not as the historical individual, Jesus ofNazareth). The appearance of Strauss’s book confirmed thesuspicions of theological conservatives like E.W. Hengstenberg andHeinrich Leo that Hegel’s philosophy, despite its use ofChristian terminology, is incompatible with the historical faith, andthe editors of the Berlin Annals felt compelled to publicly discreditStrauss’s Hegelian credentials. It was in the wake of theseevents that Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer established theHalle Annals for German Science and Art, which served forseveral years as the principal literary organ of the so-called YoungHegelians. Among the essays and reviews that Feuerbach began tocontribute to theHalle Annals in 1838 is one entitled“Toward a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy” (1839), inwhich he began to distance himself publicly from the Hegelian cause,calling for a “return to nature,” as well as for anaturalistic explanation of the mysteries of Christianity and ofreligion more generally.^[9] Publication of theHalle Annals was suspended by thePrussian censor in 1841.

Feuerbach achieved the height of his brief literary fame with thepublication, also in 1841, ofThe Essence of Christianity, awork that made a striking impression on a number of hiscontemporaries. Engels recalled the appearance of this book as havinga profoundly “liberating effect” on him and Marx by“breaking the spell” of the Hegelian system andestablishing the truths that human consciousness is the onlyconsciousness or spirit that exists, and that it is ontologicallydependent upon the physical existence of human beings as part ofnature (Engels 1888: 12–13). In 1844, Marx wrote to Feuerbach,with reference to the latter’sPrinciples of the Philosophyof the Future (1843; hereafterPrinciples) andTheEssence of Faith According to Luther (1844), that in them he had,intentionally or not, “given socialism a philosophicalfoundation” (GW v. 18, p. 376). In fact, Feuerbach wasonly then beginning to acquaint himself with socialist ideas throughhis reading of authors like Lorenz von Stein and Wilhelm Weitling. Inthe end, he declined Marx’s request for a contribution to theGerman-French Annals, as well as Ruge’s urging that hebecome more politically engaged. He came out of rural seclusion toobserve, with great anticipation followed by mounting disillusionment,the events in Frankfurt in 1848, and to deliver a series of publiclectures at Heidelberg beginning the same year. Rather than working tospell out in detail the “philosophy of the future” forwhich he himself had called in the early 1840s, Feuerbach continued tofocus his attention mainly on religion in works includingTheEssence of Religion (1845),Lectures on the Essence ofReligion (1851), andTheogony According to the Sources ofClassical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity (1857). The five yearsof philological labor he invested in the latter work, which heconsidered his crowning achievement, went largely unnoticed both byhis contemporaries and by posterity.

During the 1840s, Feuerbach corresponded, and occasionally visited andmaintained close personal relationships with, several leading Germanradicals, including, in addition to Ruge and Marx, the publishers,Otto Lüning, Otto Wigand, and Julius Fröbel; therevolutionary poet, Georg Herwegh, and his wife, Emma; Hermann Kriege,a freelance activist and early German socialist who emigrated toAmerica; as well as the scientific materialists, Carl Vogt and JacobMoleschott. It was in a review of a book on nutrition published by thelatter figure that Feuerbach famously quipped, “Man ist, was manißt,” making a play on words that doesn’t comethrough in the English expression, “You are what you eat.”The impression made by Feuerbach on several leading lights of theyounger generation is reflected in Gottfried Keller’sBildungsroman,Green Henry (1855), which features acharacter inspired by Feuerbach, as well as in the original dedication(to Feuerbach) of Richard Wagner’s early book,The Art-Workof the Future (1850).

Partly as the result of a global financial crisis, the porcelainfactory that had supported Feuerbach’s literary existence wentbankrupt in 1859. The following year he and his wife and daughter wereforced to relocate to the village of Rechenberg, located then on theoutskirts of Nuremberg, where Feuerbach lived out the remainder of hislife in increasingly ill health. Although his productivity as a writerdeclined sharply during this period, he was able, in 1866, to bringout the tenth and final volume of his collected works (which had begunto appear in 1846), bearing the title,God, Freedom andImmortality from the Standpoint of Anthropology, and including afairly substantial, though fragmentary, essay “On Spiritualismand Materialism, Especially in Relation to the Freedom of theWill”. In this essay, and in an essay on ethics that Feuerbachleft incomplete at his death, we find him beginning to sketch out amoral psychology, and an eudaimonistic ethical theory, in which theconcept of the “drive-to-happiness”(Glückseligkeitstrieb) plays a central role.

2. Early Idealistic Pantheism

In an essay published in 1835, Heinrich Heine observed that pantheismhad by this time become “the secret religion of Germany”.^[10] That Feuerbach is generally remembered as an atheist and amaterialist has tended to obscure the fact that he began hisphilosophical career as an enthusiastic adherent of this philosophicalreligion, one early expression of which can be found in the Greekwords “Hen kai Pan” (One and All) inscribed in1791 by Hölderlin in Hegel’s student album fromTübingen (cf. Pinkard 2000: 32).^[11] This inscription is an allusion to words uttered by Lessing afterreading Goethe’s poem-fragment, “Prometheus”, andresponding enthusiastically by declaring himself a Spinozist,according to the account contained in Jacobi’s famousLetters on the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785; cf. Jacobi [MPW]:187). It was the publication of these letters that set off theoriginal Pantheism Controversy, and had the unintended effect ofleading more than one generation of young German poets and thinkers toregard Spinoza no longer as a “dead dog” and a godlessatheist, but rather as the God-intoxicated sage of a pantheistic creedin which those who, like Lessing, could no longer“stomach” orthodox conceptions of the divinity that make astrict distinction between creator and creation, could seek to satisfytheir spiritual aspirations. Feuerbach included several verses of thePrometheus-fragment as an epigram to his first book, in which he usedthe tools of Hegelian logic to develop a conception of the divinity asOne and All along lines laid out by Spinoza, Giordano Bruno and JacobBoehme. These three he hailed as ‘pious God-inspiredsages’ (GTU 241/48) who set the table for the ‘feast ofreconciliation’ (GTU 463/214) between nature and spirit that itis that task of the modern age to celebrate. But this reconciliation,he argued, cannot occur as long as God continues to be thought of asan individual person existing independently of the world.

That Feuerbach, unlike Strauss, never accepted Hegel’scharacterization of Christianity as the consummate religion is clearfrom the contents of a letter he sent to Hegel along with hisdissertation in 1828.^[12] In this letter he identified the historical task remaining in thewake of Hegel’s philosophical achievement to be theestablishment of the “sole sovereignty of reason” in a“kingdom of the Idea” that would inaugurate a newspiritual dispensation. Foreshadowing arguments put forward in hisfirst book, Feuerbach went on in this letter to emphasize the need for“the I, the self in general, which especially since thebeginning of the Christian era, has ruled the world and has thought ofitself as the only spirit that exists at all [to be] cast down fromits royal throne” (GW v. 17,Briefwechsel I(1817–1839), 103–08). This, he proposed, would requireprevailing ways of thinking about time, death, this world and thebeyond, individuality, personhood and God to be radically transformedwithin and beyond the walls of academia.

Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways ofthinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where hepresented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy againstthose critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certainlimits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculativephilosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued,presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of theindividual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument forapprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature ofreason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinkingsubjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking(Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, butrather by “the species” acting through the individual.“In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound togetherwith, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—allhuman beings” (GW I:18).

In the introduction toThoughts Feuerbach assumes the role ofdiagnostician of a spiritual malady by which he claims that modernmoral subjects are afflicted. This malady, which he does not name butmight have called either individualism or egoism, he takes to be thedefining 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). Theprincipal symptom of this malady is the loss of “the perception[Anschauung] of the true totality, of oneness and life in oneunity” (GTU 264/66). This loss Feuerbach findsreflected in three general tendencies of the modern age: 1) thetendency to regard human history solely as the history of the opinionsand actions of individual human subjects, and not as the history ofhumanity conceived as a single collective agent; 2) the tendency toregard nature as a mere aggregate of “countless single stars,stones, plants, animals, elements and things” (GTU195/14) whose relations to one another are entirely external andmechanical, rather than as an organic whole the internal dynamics ofwhich are animated by a single all-encompassing vital principle; and3) the tendency to conceive of God as a personal agent whoseinscrutable will, through which the world came into being from nothingand is continually directed, is unconstrained by rationalnecessity.

Feuerbach’s basic objection to the theistic conception of Godand his relation to creation is that, on it, both are conceived asequally spiritless. Rather than consisting of lifeless matter to whichmotion is first imparted by the purposeful action of an externalagent, Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself theprinciple of its own development. It exercises “unlimitedcreative power” by ceaselessly dividing and distinguishing itsindividual parts from one another. But the immeasurable multiplicityof systems within systems that results from this activity constitutesa single organic totality.

Nature is ground and principle of itself, or—what is the samething, it exists out of necessity, out of the soul, the essence ofGod, 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.

InThoughts, Feuerbach further argues that the death offinite individuals is not merely an empirical fact, but also anapriori truth that follows from a proper understanding of therelations between the infinite and the finite, and between essence andexistence. Nature is the totality of finite individuals existing indistinction from one another in time and space. Since to be a finiteindividual is not to be any number of other individuals from which oneis distinct, non-being is not only the condition of individuals beforethey have begun to exist and after they have ceased to do so, but alsoa condition in which they participate by being the determinateentities that they are. Thus, being and non-being, or life and death,are equally constitutive of the existence of finite entitiesthroughout the entire course of their generation and destruction.

Everything that exists has an essence that is distinct from itsexistence. Although individuals exist in time and space, theiressences do not. Essence in general is timeless and unextended.Feuerbach nevertheless regards it as a kind of cognitive space inwhich individual essences are conceptually contained. Real orthree-dimensional space, within which individual things and peopleexist in distinction from one another and in temporal succession, hethinks of as essence “in the determination of itsbeing-outside-of-itself” (GTU 250/55). In hisbeing-one, Feuerbach argues, God is everything-as-one, and is, assuch, the universal essence in which all finite essences are“grounded, contained and comprehended[begriffen]” (GTU 241/48).

It is by means ofEmpfindung or sense experience thatsentient 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 whateveris directly experienced occurs “now”, or at the moment intime to which we refer as “the present”. Experience, inother words, is essentially transitory, and its contents areincommunicable. What we experience are the perceivable features ofindividual objects. It is through the act of thinking that we are ableto identify those features through the possession of which differentindividuals belong to the same species, with the other members ofwhich they share these essential features in common.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinkingis not an activity performed by the individual personquaindividual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famouslyreferred in thePhenomenology as “‘I’ thatis ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110). Pure spirit isnothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinkerparticipates without himself (or herself) being the principal thinkingagent. That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness ofindividual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due not to thenature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and tothe fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participatein the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist ascorporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thusnotpure spirit.

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

Death is just the withdrawal and departure of your objectivity fromyour subjectivity, which is eternally living activity and thereforeeverlasting and immortal. (GTU 323/111)

Arguing thus, he urges his readers to acknowledge and accept theirreversibility of their individual mortality so that, in doing so,they might come to an awareness of the immortality of theirspecies-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which isnot the individual person with whom they are accustomed to identifyingthemselves. 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 ofhumanity, in the inexhaustible love and creative power of Spirit, inits eternally unfolding itself into new individuals out of the womb ofits 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 pressingexistential needs of the embodied individual subject, it should benoted that, during his early idealistic phase, Feuerbach was stronglycommitted to a theoretical ideal of philosophy according to whichcontemplation of, and submersion in, God is the highestethical act of which human beings are capable. Whereas, inhis later works, Feuerbach would seek to compel philosophy

to come down from its divine and self-sufficient blissfulness inthought and open its eyes tohuman misery, (GPZ264/3)

here he spoke instead of

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

3. Feuerbach as Historian of Philosophy

The understanding of reason as one and universal that underlies theworks discussed in the preceding section also informs the approachtaken by Feuerbach to the history of philosophy in the threepreviously mentioned books, and in a series of lectures, that heproduced during the 1830s.^[13] In his lectures on the history of modern philosophy, Feuerbachemphasizes that philosophical reflection is an activity to which humanbeings aredriven. The history of the philosophical systemsthat this activity has produced, he maintains, is conceived onlysubjectively, and thus inadequately, so long as it is regarded as thehistory of the opinions of individual thinkers. Because thinking is aspecies-activity, the philosophical systems that have arisen in thecourse of the history of philosophy should be regarded as necessarystandpoints of reason itself. The Idea is not something first producedby philosophical reflection. Rather, the individual thinker, to theextent the he or she succeeds in transcending his or herindividuality, comes to function as an instrument or organ throughwhich the Idea actualizes one of its moments, which is laterreproduced in the consciousness of the historian of philosophy. Theactivity of the Idea is experienced subjectively as inspiration(Begeisterung). In producing itself, the Idea does not passfrom nonbeing into being, but rather from one state of being (being initself) to another (being for itself). The Idea produces itself bydetermining itself, and human consciousness is the medium of itsself-actualization.

Reason is nothing but theself-activity of the eternal,infinite idea, whether in art or religion or philosophy, but thisactivity is always the activity of the Idea in aparticulardetermination and thus also at aparticular time, for itis precisely according to the particular determinations of the ideathat enter successively into human consciousness that we differentiatethe periods and epochs of history. (VGP 11)

The emergence of new philosophical systems results, on this view, froma necessity that is both internal and external. Certain philosophicalideas are only capable of being conceived and articulated underspecific historical conditions. Just as it was only possible forChristianity to appear at that point in history when the ties thatbound family and nation in Greco-Roman antiquity were dissolving, soit was only possible for modern philosophy to appear under specifichistorical conditions. Feuerbach locates the beginning of the historyof modern philosophy at the point where the modern spirit first beginsto distinguish itself from the medieval spirit. The dominant principleof the medieval period was the Judeo-Christian, monotheisticprinciple, according to which God is conceived as an omnipotent personthrough an act of whose will the material world was created fromnothing (ex nihilo). It is because nature, as conceived fromthis standpoint, is excluded from the divine substance, according toFeuerbach, that medieval thought showed so little interest in theinvestigation of nature. It is only where the substantiality of naturebegins to be rediscovered that the spirit of modernity distinguishesitself from the medieval spirit. This occurs most clearly where mattercomes to be regarded as an attribute of the divine substance, so thatGod is no longer conceived of as a being distinct from nature butrather as the immutable and eternal imminent cause from which theplenitude of finite shapes in nature pours forth. This happens firstamong the nature philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, andsubsequently in the speculative reflections of Jakob Böhme and inthe system of Spinoza. Indeed, it is one distinctive feature ofFeuerbach’s view of the history of modern philosophy that hethinks of it as beginning, not with Descartes, but with the naturephilosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Feuerbach insists upon thespeculative significance of Bacon’s philosophy of nature. It isprecisely in subjecting nature to experimentation, and thereby torational comprehension, that spirit raises itself above nature. Butwhile Feuerbach emphasizes the philosophical importance of experiencein the modern rediscovery of nature, he nevertheless insists thatempiricism lacks a “principle” of its own. Later he willspeak of the need for an alliance between German metaphysics and“the anti-scholastic, sanguine principle of Frenchsensualism and materialism” (VT 254–255/165,emphasis in the original).

Feuerbach’s conviction that Christian faith is inimical toreason and philosophy was strengthened by his own studies of thehistory of modern philosophy, especially his studies of Leibniz andBayle. As previously noted, his monographs on these figures werewritten during the period of controversy following the appearance ofStrauss’sLife of Jesus. Toward the end of the 1830s,the Young Hegelians were increasingly opposed on two fronts: on theone hand, by right-wing Hegelians such as Friedrich Göschel, whoinsisted upon the compatibility of Hegelianism and Protestantorthodoxy, and, on the other, by representatives of the so-called“Positive Philosophy”, who, taking their inspiration fromthe late Schelling, identified the personality of God as disclosed inthe Christian revelation as the supreme metaphysical principle (cf.Breckman 1999 and Gooch 2011). It is in light of these developmentsthat, beginning in the Leibniz monograph, Feuerbach soughtincreasingly to distinguish from one another, and to demonstrate theincompatibility of, what he refers to there as “thephilosophical standpoint” and “the theologicalstandpoint”, respectively. Feuerbach regards the theologicalstandpoint as “practical” because it imagines God as abeing separate from the world, upon which he acts according topurposes similar to those that guide the actions of human beings,rather than conceiving the world as a necessary, and hence rationallyintelligible, consequence of the divine nature. To be sure, forLeibniz, there is nothing arbitrary about the divine will. God’swill is determined by his infinite wisdom and goodness, which compelhim to choose to create the best possible world. But this attempt tosynthesize rational necessity and divine sovereignty remains inFeuerbach’s view an unacceptable compromise. Like Tycho Brahe,who sought to combine the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomies, hethinks Leibniz sought to reconcile the irreconcilable. Feuerbach tookLeibniz’s theory of monads to be an original philosophicalposition that offers a genuinely novel conception of substance, and analternative to the mechanistic-mathematical Cartesian account ofmotion, and thus constitutes an organic link in the developmentalsequence of historical philosophical systems. He criticized Leibniz,however, for not having derived the unity or harmony of the monadsfrom the nature of the monads themselves, and for appealing instead toa theological representation of God as an alien, external power whoachieves this harmonization miraculously, and hence, inexplicably.

Although, considered superficially, Feuerbach’s study of Bayleis a continuation of the line of inquiry pursued in his earlierhistorical monographs, closer inspection confirms Rawidowicz’sobservation that this book marks an important turning point in hisintellectual development (Rawidowicz 1964: 62–62). The book isfull of digressions that go on for many pages without making anyreference to Bayle, which can produce an impression that it lacks aclearly defined focus. In fact Feuerbach is here moving toward, andbuilding a case for, a claim that he articulates more explicitly insucceeding years, namely, that the “practical negation” ofChristianity is afait accompli insofar as the scientific,economic, aesthetic, ethical and political values and institutionsthat are constitutive of modern European culture are incompatible withthe demands of authentic Christian faith as expressed in the Bible andin the writings of patristic and medieval authors, who are eitherindifferent or inimical to the scientific investigation of nature, theacquisition of wealth, the pursuit of artistic creativity as an end initself, and attempts to establish ethical and political norms on thebasis of universally valid rational principles rather than theauthority of revelation or of the Church.

Although the Protestant Reformation, in its rejection of clericalcelibacy, its affirmation of the vocation of the laity, and itsseparation of temporal and spiritual authority, resolved thecontradiction between the spirit and the flesh that was characteristicof medieval Catholicism, Feuerbach argues, it failed to resolve thecontradiction between faith and reason, or theology and philosophy.Bayle’s historical significance for Feuerbach consists in hisuncompromising exposure of this contradiction, which, because it wasso deeply rooted in Bayle’s own character, he himself could onlyresolve by embracing fideism. Feuerbach sought to further expose thiscontraction in his 1839 essay, “On Philosophy andChristianity”, in which he for the first time publiclyrepudiated the Hegelian claim that philosophy affirms in the form ofconceptual thinking the same truths affirmed by religion in the formof sensible representations.

4. The Critique of Christianity

In a section of the preface to the second edition ofThe Essenceof Christianity (1843) that Eliot omitted from her translation,Feuerbach reveals that he had sought in this book to achieve twothings: First, to attack the Hegelian claim for the identity ofreligious and philosophical truth by showing that Hegel succeeds inreconciling religion with philosophy only by robbing religion of itsmost distinctive content. Second,

to place the so-called positive philosophy in a most fatal light byshowing that the original of its idolatrous image of God[Götzenbild] is man, that flesh and blood belong topersonality essentially. (WC 10–11)

Appreciation of each of these objectives requires furtherclarification of the historical context in which Feuerbach’sbook appeared, namely one year after the ascension to the Prussianthrone of the Romantic conservative, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The newking’s inner circle of advisers consisted of devout aristocratsclosely associated with the neo-Pietist Awakening, who sought toestablish a German-Christian state as a bulwark against the influenceof subversive ideas on the continent. 1840 also saw the death of thePrussian minister of culture, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, who hadbeen a supporter of the Hegelian cause and a bearer of the hopes ofthe Young Hegelians both for academic advancement and for a Prussianstate informed by a progressive Protestant ethos amenable to thefreedom of theoretical inquiry. The wedge driven by the outcrysurrounding the appearance of Strauss’s book between the rightand left wings of the Hegelian camp made this “center”position increasingly untenable. The policies of Altenstein’ssuccessor, including the appointment, in 1841, of Schelling to thechair in Berlin formerly occupied by Hegel, were aimed instead atslaying the “dragonseed” of Hegelian pantheism in theuniversities under Prussian jurisdiction (cf. Pinkard 2002:317–332).

By the time Feuerbach published his most famous book,The Essenceof Christianity (1841), in which he sought to develop “aphilosophy 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 Hegelianspeculative theology and the positive philosophy from “the samestandpoint” taken by Spinoza in hisTheologico-PoliticalTreatise (VWR 16/9; cf.WC 10–11) hasoften been overlooked. At one point in theTreatise Spinozaobserves that the biblical authors

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

InChristianity, Feuerbach makes a similar distinctionbetween the metaphysical and personal divine predicates. Godconsidered as the theoretical object of rational reflection, or“God as God”, is a timeless and impassible entity that isunaffected by human suffering and ultimately indistinguishable fromreason itself.

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

It is God’s personal predicates that concern the religiousbeliever, for whom God exists, not as an object of theoreticalcontemplation, but of feeling, imagination, and prayerfulsupplication.

Whereas the metaphysical predicates, which “serve only asexternal points of support to religion” (WC 62/25), canbe thought of as ones that apply to the first person of the Trinity(i.e., God in his abstract universality), the second person of theTrinity, by virtue of his having subjected himself, for the salvationof humanity, to a humble birth and an ignominious death, “is thesole, true, first person in religion” (WC 106/51). Thedoctrine of the Incarnation, Feuerbach argues against Hegel, is not,for the Christian believer, a symbolic representation of the eternalprocession and return of infinite spirit into, and back from, itsfinite manifestations. It is rather “a tear of divine compassion[Mitleid]” (WC 102/50), and, as such, the actof a sacred heart that is able to sympathize with human suffering.That God was compelled by his love for humanity to renounce hisdivinity and become human Feuerbach takes as proof that “Man wasalreadyin God, was alreadyGod himself, before Godbecame man” (ibid.), i.e., that belief in divine compassioninvolves the attribution or projection onto God of a moral sentimentthat 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 thefirst part, Feuerbach considers religion “in its agreement withthe human essence” (WC 75). Here he argues that, whenpurportedly theological claims are understood in their proper sense,they are recognized as expressing anthropological, rather thantheological, truths. That is, the predicates that religious believersapply to God are predicates thatproperly apply to the humanspecies-essence of which God is an imaginary representation. In thesecond part, Feuerbach considers religion “in its contradictionwith the human essence” (WC 316). Here he argues that,when theological claims are understood in the sense in which they areordinarily 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 presentedto the public under the label “anthropotheism” rather than“atheism” (GW v. 18, 164), emphasizing that hisoverriding purpose in negating “the false or theological essenceof religion” had been to affirm its “true oranthropological essence”, i.e., the divinity of man.

Feuerbach beginsThe Essence of Christianity by proposingthat, since human beings have religion and animals do not, the key tounderstanding religion must be directly related to whatever it is thatmost essentially distinguishes human beings from animals. This, hemaintains, is the distinctive kind of consciousness that is involvedin the cognition of universals.^[16] A being endowed with such “species-consciousness” is ableto take its own essential nature as an object of thought. The capacityfor thought is conceived here as the capacity to engage in internaldialogue, and thus to be aware of oneself as containing both an I anda Thou (a generic other), so that, in the act of thinking, the humanindividual stands in a relation to his species in which non-humananimals, and human beingsqua biological organisms, areincapable of standing. When a human being is conscious of himself (orherself) as human, he is conscious of himself not only as a thinkingbeing, but also as a willing and a feeling being.

The power of thinking is the light of knowledge [desErkenntnis], 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 theform of non-egoistic species-drives (Gattungstriebe) by whichindividuals periodically find themselves overwhelmed, especially thosepoets and thinkers in whose works the species-essence is most clearly instantiated.^[17] Such manifestations include the experiences of erotic and platoniclove; the drive to knowledge; the experience of being moved by theemotion expressed in music; the voice of conscience, which compels usto moderate our desires to avoid infringing on the freedom of others;compassion; admiration; and the urge to overcome our own moral andintellectual limitations. The latter urge, Feuerbach contends,presupposes an awareness that our individual limitations arenot limitations of the species-essence, which functions thusas the norm or ideal toward which the individual’s efforts atself-transcendence are directed.

The individual human being is limited both physically and morally. Ourphysical existence is limited in time and space. We are alsolimited—and often painfully aware of our being so—in ourintellectual and moral capacities. But I only experience as a painfullimitation my inability to be and do things that others of my kind areable to be and to do, so that, in recognizing my own limitations, Isimultaneously recognize that they arenot limitations of thespecies. If they were, either I would not be aware of them at all, orI would not experience my awareness of them as painful. For example, Ionly reprove myself for cowardice because I am aware of the bravery ofothers, which I myself lack, and for my stinginess because I am awareof the generosity of others, which I myself lack. The experience ofconscience—taken in the broad sense as an awareness ofone’s moral and intellectual shortcomings andinadequacies—thus presupposes species-consciousness in the formof an awareness of qualities that one finds oneself lacking but canimagine oneself, under other circumstances, possessing.

Feuerbach’s central claim inThe Essence ofChristianity is that Christian theism is predicated upon analienated form of human self-consciousness wherein human beings relatethemselves to their own human species-essence as though it were abeing distinct from themselves. Although, in developing this claim,Feuerbach was clearly influenced by Hegel’s account of UnhappyConsciousness in thePhenomenology, Ameriks’ contentionthat

Feuerbach’s philosophical doctrines […] can be understoodas little more than a filling out of the details of Hegel’sscathing account of orthodox Christianity as a form of “unhappyconsciousness” (Ameriks 2000: 259)

is problematic for several reasons. First, it overlooks the likelihoodof Hegel’s having understood his analysis of UnhappyConsciousness to apply to the otherworldliness he associated withmedieval Catholicism, or perhaps to otherworldly religion moregenerally, but not in any case to the type of Protestantism that heregarded as “the religion of the modern age” (Hegel [1807]1977: 14), and in which he found the sacred and the secularreconciled. Second, it overlooks the fact that Feuerbach’sappropriation of themes found in Hegel’s account of UnhappyConsciousness occurs in the context of an explicit, albeit incomplete,repudiation of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit. Unlike Hegel, whoconceives of Unhappy Consciousness as a moment in the development ofhuman self-consciousnessthat is also a moment in thecoming-to-be-for-itself of the absolute, Feuerbach has by this timereached the conclusion that one cannot distinguish absolute spiritfrom “subjective spirit or the essence of man” without, inthe end, continuing to occupy “the old standpoint oftheology” (VT 246–247). Third, it overlooks thesignificance of Feuerbach’s emphasis on the importance, forgrasping the essence of religion, of precisely those subjectiveaspects of religious consciousness (imagination and feeling) thatHegel himself regarded as inessential or of secondary importance.Finally, in connection with this third point, it overlooks thesignificance of Feuerbach’s agreement with Spinoza against Hegelthat “faith […] requires not so much truth aspiety” (Spinoza [1677] 2007: 184).

In a short essay, published 1842, in which he sought to clarify thedifference between his own approach to the philosophy of religion andHegel’s, Feuerbach suggested that this difference is mostevident in the relations in which each of them stands toSchleiermacher, who famously defined religion as the feeling of utterdependence. Whereas Hegel had “rebuked” Schleiermacher forabdicating the truth-claims of the Christian faith by taking thearticles of faith as expressions of this feeling, Feuerbach says hedoes so only because Schleiermacher was prevented by his“theological prejudice” from drawing the unavoidableconclusion that, “if feeling is subjectively what religion ischiefly about, then God is objectively nothing but the essence offeeling” (B 230). These comments fail to acknowledgethat, inThe Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach had conceivedof God as an alienated projection of the human species-essence, whichwas said to includenot only feeling, but reason and will, aswell. They nevertheless reflect Feuerbach’s generally overlookeddeployment against Hegel of resources derived from the philosophies offeeling of Schleiermacher and Jacobi,^[18] and they indicate the direction in which his thinking about religioncontinued to move after the publication ofThe Essence ofChristianity, namely, away from an emphasis onspecies-consciousness conceived along Hegelian lines, and toward whatHarvey has aptly referred to as the“naturalist-existentialist” themes that predominate in hislater writings on religion (cf. Harvey 1995). These are discussed inSection 6 below.

5. The “New” Philosophy

In notes for lectures on the history of modern philosophy that hedelivered in 1835/36, Feuerbach wrote that idealism is the “onetrue philosophy”, and that “what is not spirit isnothing” (VGP 139). Around the same time, hevigorously defended the “absolute method” employed byHegel in hisLogic against its critics (GW 8:73).Feuerbach himself referred to his early philosophical“standpoint” as “the standpoint of pantheisticidentity” (GW 10:291). His efforts to extricate himselffrom this standpoint were ongoing over the course of two decades. Theextent to which they ultimately succeeded is debatable. Whereas theyoung Marx saw Feuerbach as “the trueconqueror of theold philosophy”, the neo-Kantian historian ofmaterialism, 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 ofsensuousness” 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 withHegelianism in the essay, “Toward a Critique of the HegelianPhilosophy”, he was still able to write that he missed inspeculative philosophy “the element of the empirical, and inempiricism the element of speculation”, and to describe his ownmethod as an effort to conjoin both kinds of philosophical“activity” into a form of “skepticism orcritique just as much of themerely speculative asof themerely empirical” (GW 9:12). It wasonly in 1842, between the time of the publication of the first (1841)and second (1843) editions ofThe Essence of Christianity(which happens also to have been a time of draconian censorship andpolice surveillance) that Feuerbach became convinced of the need tomake a “radical break” with the speculative philosophical tradition.^[20] This prompted him to report in the preface to the second edition ofhis famous book that “the Idea” retained for him only apractical significance as “faith in the historical future”and in the triumph of truth and virtue. In the realm of theoreticalphilosophy proper, and “in complete opposition to the Hegelianphilosophy,” he now considered himself a realist and amaterialist (WC 15).

In two brief philosophical manifestos published in 1842 and 1843,respectively, Feuerbach sought to “deduce”, through aninternal criticism of the “old” philosophy (culminating inthe Hegelian system), the “principles”(Grundsätze) that would lay the foundation for a“new”, naturalistic “philosophy of thefuture”. After the publication of these two manifestos, however,he turned his attention back to religion, claiming in the foreword tothe first volume of his collected works (1846) that it was only in hisbook onThe Essence of Faith According to Luther (1844) thathe came to appreciate the “truth and essentiality ofsensuousness [Sinnlichkeit]” (GW 10:187), andthereby to overcome the “contradiction” betweenspeculation and empiricism in which his position inThe Essence ofChristianity had remained mired. It is certainly the case that anumber of concepts that are central to the philosophical anthropologywith which Feuerbach sought to replace the “old”philosophy, including the effort to “naturalize freedom”undertaken in his final writings, were first introduced and developedin writings on religion published in the 1840s and 1850s. Because ofthis, it’s difficult to neatly separate a discussion ofFeuerbach’s “new” philosophy from his latertheorizing about religion. Be that as it may, the first of thesetopics will be explored in this section and the second in thesucceeding section. Feuerbach’s preliminary efforts in his lastactive years to develop a drive psychology and to naturalize ethicswill be considered briefly in the final section.

One thing that distinguishes Feuerbach’s “new”philosophy from other versions of modern empiricism and materialism ishis claim to have derived the “principles” of thisphilosophy through a dialectical inversion of the Hegelian system. Inthe “Theses” Feuerbach argues that, by“positing” the human essence “outside of man”in the ethereal realm of absolute spirit, the Hegelian philosophyperpetuates the theological alienation of human beings from their ownessence, which he now explicitly equates with subjective spirit. There-appropriation of this abstracted essence by finite, corporeal humansubjects cannot be achieved “positively” [auf positiveWeg], but only through a “total negation” of theHegelian philosophy that will reveal once and for all theincarnational telos of the history of philosophy and humanity(VT 247). In this way, Feuerbach thinks, the hidden“truth of Christianity” (VT 263) will finally berealized in the form of an atheistic humanism that renounces thefantastical consolations of religion in order to embrace thehistorical tasks of human self-realization and the creation of newpolitical and cultural institutions that will be conducive to it.

In 1846, Feuerbach published a number of “fragments” fromhis unpublished papers intended to document the course of hisphilosophical development. One of these fragments, entitled“Doubt”, and dated 1827–28 (which is the time whenFeuerbach was writing his doctoral dissertation) seems already toanticipate Feuerbach’s later critique of Hegel. In thisfragment, we find him questioning the transition from the first to thesecond part of Hegel’s tripartite philosophical system, i.e.,the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature. Theconceptual process traced by Hegel in the Logic, whereby thecategories of thought are successively deduced from one another, isdriven by the negativity of the logical determinations of each ofthese categories, until the process culminates in the absolute Idea.But what negativity remains within the absolute Idea to propel thetransition from thought to being, Feuerbach wonders, unless it is thatthe purportedly “absolute” Idea remains unrealized, andhence incomplete, until it becomes incarnate in the realm of thesensuous, i.e., nature? In that case, however, nature itself (as therealm of the sensuous) is the hidden truth of the Idea.

The speculative claim for the identity of thought and being was thecornerstone 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 thisclaim. Feuerbach argues that, because the concept of pure being withwhich Hegel begins theLogic is an abstraction, in the endHegel succeeds only in reconciling thought with the thought of being,rather than with being itself, which is the “other” ofthought. The new philosophy affirms that being is distinct from, andprior to, thought, and that it is as various as is the panoply ofindividually existing beings, from which it cannot be intelligiblydistinguished.

Thought comes from being, but being does not come from thought.[…] The essence of beingas being [i.e., in contrastto the merethought of being] is the essence of nature.(VT 258/168)

To say that something exists in actuality is to say that it exists notonly as a figment of someone’s imagination, or as a meredetermination of their consciousness, but for itself, independently ofconsciousness. “Being is something in which not only I but alsoothers, above all also the object itself, participate”(GPZ 304/40). In affirming the distinction between thoughtand being, repudiating Hegel’s critique of sense certainty, andaffirming the claim that nature exists through itself, independentlyof thought, the new philosophy also affirms the reality of time andspace, insisting that real existence is finite, determinate, corporealexistence. Whereas, in his lectures on logic and metaphysics, and inhis writings from the mid-1830’s, Feuerbach had defended theHegelian method of the logicalEntwicklung or development ofthe various moments of the absolute Idea, he now argues that theconcept of development entails or presupposes temporality, so that anon-temporal developmental process is a contradiction in terms. Ifspeculative philosophy is the philosophy of the infinite, the newphilosophy aims to disclose the truth of finitude by reversing thepath taken by speculation from the infinite to the finite, and fromthe indeterminate to the determinate (VT 249).

Although, in the “Theses”, Feuerbach refers to“speculative philosophy” as having been inaugurated bySpinoza, revived by Schelling, and perfected by Hegel (VT243), inPrinciples he locates the origin of this traditionin the Cartesian philosophy, and specifically in “theabstraction from the sensuous [Sinnlichkeit], frommatter” (GPZ 275/ 13) through which the conception ofthe cogito first arose. Much of the content ofPrinciplesconsists of a truncated survey of the history of modern philosophythat purports to trace, through several dialectical inversions, anecessary development from the rationalistic theism of Descartes andLeibniz through the pantheism of Spinoza to the idealism of Kant andFichte, culminating in Hegel’s philosophy of identity. What thissurvey is primarily intended to show is that the fundamental tendencyof this development has been toward the actualization and humanizationof God or, alternatively, toward

thedivinization of thereal, of themateriallyexistent—of materialism, empiricism, realism,humanism—[and] the negation of theology. (GPZ 285/22)

This survey is followed by a short “demonstration” of thehistorical necessity of the new philosophy, which takes the form of acritique of Hegel, and by the enumeration of several doctrines thatdistinguish the new philosophy from the old.

Whereas earlier rationalists had conceived of God as existing priorto, and independently of, nature, and as possessing perfect knowledgeuntainted by materiality; and had, further, “placed the effortand labor of abstraction and of self-liberation from the sensuous onlyin themselves”, Feuerbach views Hegel as having been the firstto transform “this subjective activity into the self-activity ofthe divine being.” Thus, for Hegel, like the heroes of paganantiquity, God (or the Idea) must “fight through virtue for hisdivinity”, and only comes to be for himself (or itself) at theend of a lengthy and laborious process (GPZ 296/32). Thisprocess, as it is described by Hegel at the end of theScience ofLogic, involves the logical Idea

freely releas[ing] itself … [into] theexternality of space and time existing absolutely on its ownwithout the moment of subjectivity. (Hegel [1812–1816] 1969:843)

What Feuerbach refers to as “the liberation of the absolute frommatter” is achieved as spirit gradually distinguishes itselffrom nature before attaining to the awareness of itself as absolute.Here, Feuerbach notes, “matter is indeed posited in God, thatis, it is posited as God”, and to posit matter as God is toaffirm atheism and materialism, but insofar as theself-externalization of the Idea in nature is superseded in the courseof 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 whenhe refers to Hegel’s philosophy as

the last magnificent attempt to restore Christianity, which was lostand wrecked, through philosophy … by identifying it with thenegation of Christianity. (GPZ 297/34)

The new philosophy categorically affirms the embodied nature of humansubjectivity and self-consciousness. Whereas the old philosophyconceived of the cogito as “an abstract and merely a thinkingbeing to whose essence the body does not belong” (GPZ319–320/ 54), the new philosophy affirms that, as a thinkingsubject, “I am a real, sensuous being and, indeed, the body inits totality is my ego, my essence itself” (ibid.). Although itis not entirely clear just what Feuerbach could mean in claiming that“the body in its totality is my ego”, elsewhere he saysthat to affirm that the ego is corporeal “has no other meaningthan that the ego is not only active but also passive … [andthat] the passivity of the ego is the activity of the object” insuch a way that “the object belongs to the innermost being ofthe ego” (AP 150/142). Object and ego are thus, to usea Heideggerian term,gleichursprunglich or“equiprimordial”.

It is through the body that the ego is not just an ego but also anobject. To be embodied is to be in the world; it means to have so manysenses, i.e., so many pores and naked surfaces. The body is nothingbut the porous ego. (AP 151/143)

If philosophical thought is to avoid remaining “a prisoner ofthe ego”, Feuerbach insists, it “must begin with itsantithesis, with itsalter ego” (AP146/138). The antithesis of thought is sensation. Whereas, inthinking, it is the object that is determined by the thinking activityof the subject, in sense experience, Feuerbach insists (without muchargument and with apparently little concern for problems thatpreoccupied the British empiricists and Kant), the consciousness ofthe subject is determined by the activity of the object. The objectcan thus be said to function as a subject in its own right. What makesit possible for the ego to posit the object is only that, in positingthe object as something distinct from itself, the ego is at the sametime posited by the object. If, however,

the object is not only something posited, but also (to continue inthis abstract language) something which itself posits, then it isclear that the presuppositionless ego, which excludes the object fromitself and negates it, is only a presupposition of the subjective egoagainst which the object must protest. (AP 147/ 139)

It is not to the I, but to the not-I within the I, that real, sensuousobjects are given. Memory is what first enables us to transformobjects of sense experience into objects of thought, so that what isno longer present to the senses can nevertheless be recalled toconsciousness. In doing so, it allows us to transcend the limitationsof time and space in thought, and to construct, from a multitude ofdistinct 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 nowmaintains that we need not ascribe to human beings any uniquesupersensible faculty in order to affirm this truth, since

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

What distinguishes humans from non-human animals is thus not ourpossession of non-natural powers, either of reason or volition, butthe fact that human beings are “absolute sensualists”whose collective powers of observation and recollection extend, inprinciple, to the whole of nature.

6. The Later Theory of Religion

Feuerbach is most often associated with the slogan underlyingTheEssence of Christianity, according to which “theology isanthropology” (insofar as the predicates attributed byChristians to God are in fact predicates of the humanspecies-essence). In a number of works on religion published in the1840s and 1850s, however, Feuerbach advanced explanations of theorigin of religious concepts and beliefs that are strikingly differentfrom, and apparently at odds with, the more familiar position putforward in that book. The works in which Feuerbach advanced these newtheoretical initiatives include the previously referenced Luther book(1844), a short book entitledThe Essence of Religion (1846),the essay, “Belief in Immortality from the Standpoint ofAnthropology” (1847), theLectures on the Essence ofReligion originally delivered in 1848–9, but firstpublished in 1851 (hereafterLectures), and theTheogony (1857). The question of the relationship between theaccount of religion contained inThe Essence of Christianityand the views put forward in these later writings is a complex one.The most thorough investigation of this question is to be found inHarvey (1995), where Harvey distinguishes five different“explanatory principles” employed by Feuerbach inTheEssence of Christianity, among which he divides those that areconceived along Hegelian lines from those that tend instead toward the“existentialist-naturalist” themes which predominate inFeuerbach’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 religionthat is both incompatible with, and more compelling than, the morefamiliar theory presented inThe Essence of Christianity.Whereas, in that work, Feuerbach had proposed that God is an alienatedprojection of the human species-essence to whom the“perfections” of the latter are mistakenly attributed, thenew bipolar model seeks instead to explain the origin and persistenceof religious beliefs and practices, Christian and non-Christian alike,in terms of their role in meeting deep-seated psychological needsresulting from the contingency and finitude of embodied human subjectsseeking to preserve their existence and to expand their naturalpowers.

In a previously cited essay published in 1842, in which Feuerbachsought to clarify the differences between Hegel’s philosophy ofreligion and his own, he referred readers seeking to evaluate hisargument inThe Essence of Christianity to his“Critique of the So-Called Positive Philosophy”, publishedin theHalle Annals in December, 1838 (B 235). Itwas there that Feuerbach first put forward the claim that all the“determinations” (Bestimmungen) ascribed by thepositive philosophy to God are determinations either of “theessence of nature” or of “the essence of man”(KPP 204). This claim is consistent with subsequentstatements of Feuerbach’s, including his observation inPrinciples that “God, in the theological sense, is Godonly as long as he is conceived as a being distinguished from thebeing of man and nature” (GPZ 280/19). Here thesuggestion seems to be that, if it can be shown that attributesascribed by theists to God are attributes derived either from humanconsciousness or from nature, then it will have been shown that Godhas no existence apart from the existence of human consciousness andof nature. Thus, even if it is true, as Harvey is probably correct toargue, that the bipolar model of religion found in the later writingsdoes not merely supplement, but replaces, the position taken byFeuerbach inThe Essence of Christianity, these two distinctexplanatory enterprises can nevertheless be understood as alternativestrategies for making good on Feuerbach’s original claim thatthe predicates of divinity can be reduced to predicates derivedeither from the essence of nature or from the human essence.It should be noted that, while Harvey is correct in pointing out thatthe human species-essence is rarely mentioned in Feuerbach’slater writings, by 1851 Feuerbach had nevertheless still not abandonedthe claim that God, conceived as a personal being distinct fromnature, “is nothing other than the deified and objectifiedspiritual 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 inthe “Preliminary Theses” and inPrinciplescorresponds to a noticeable change in his stance toward religion, ifnot in his estimation of the truth-value of traditional doctrinalclaims. In his polemical essays of the late 1830s, and inTheEssence of Christianity, Feuerbach had unfavorably contrasted the“egoistic”, practical standpoint of religion, which heassociated with the unrestricted subjectivity of feeling(Gemüt) and imagination (Phantasie), with theimpartial, theoretical standpoint of philosophy, which he associatedwith reason and objectivity. At the end ofPrinciples,however, he informs his readers that the new philosophy, withoutceasing to be theoretical, nevertheless has a fundamentally practicaltendency, and that in this respect it “assumes the place ofreligion” and “is in truth itself religion”(GPZ 341/73). This line of thought is developed somewhatfurther in an unpublished manuscript where Feuerbach observes that, inorder to replace religion, philosophy must itself become religion inthe sense that “it must, in a way suited to its own nature,incorporate the essence of religion or the advantage that religionpossesses over philosophy” (NV 123/148). Here,Feuerbach does not say what he takes religion’s“advantage” over philosophy to be, but in theLectures he claims that the difference between philosophy andreligion can be reduced to “the simple statement that religionis sensuous and aesthetic, while philosophy is nonsensuous andabstract” (VWR 20/13). Religion’s“advantage” over the old philosophy, then, is presumablyit’s implicit acknowledgment of the “truth andessentiality of sensuousness” and of human finitude, which it isthe task of the new philosophy to articulate explicitly.

When Feuerbach’s Luther book was first published in 1844, itssubtitle suggested that it was conceived of as an addendum toTheEssence of Christianity. Because, in the first edition of thatbook, Feuerbach had relied heavily on quotations from patristic andmedieval works to support his claims, some theological critics hadretorted that, while Feuerbach’s account of Christianity mightapply to Catholicism, it did not apply to Protestantism. It was inresponding to these critics that Feuerbach turned his attention toLuther, and, in doing so, introduced a number of concepts and themesthat had not figured prominently inThe Essence ofChristianity, but which he continued to develop in his laterwritings, including both those devoted to religion, as well as thosedevoted to other topics. Foremost among these concepts and themes areSeligkeit (blessedness or perfect happiness) and theGlückseligkeitstrieb or drive-to-happiness; “humanegoism” or human self-love; the feeling of dependence on nature;and the powerful, theogonic (i.e., god-originating) wish to be freefrom the limitations of nature by which the human drive-to-happinessis restricted.

Feuerbach begins the Luther book by conceding that no doctrine wouldseem more clearly to contradict the central claim advanced inTheEssence of Christianity, namely, that Christians worship thehuman species-essence, than does Luther’s doctrine. Thatdoctrine seems, on the contrary, to be the epitome of humanself-abnegation insofar as it emphasizes the depravity andcontemptibleness of human nature in contrast to the perfection andglory of the divine nature. This appearance, however, is deceptive, onFeuerbach’s account; for, while it’s true that, whateverLuther takes from human beings, he gives to God, since all thatbelongs to God belongs to Christ, and all that belongs to Christbelongs to the Christian, it is only on the surface thatLuther’s doctrine is dehumanizing. Whereas, inThe Essenceof Christianity, Feuerbach had contrasted the egoism andintolerance of faith (which he associated with the false, theologicalessence of religion) with the altruism and universality love (which heassociated with the true, human essence of religion), in the Lutherbook he emphasizes instead that Christian faith is faith in a God whois love. Since, however, it is human beings who are the principalobject of this love, Luther’s emphasis on the comptemptabilityof human nature turns out to be an indirect form of human self-love orself-affirmation. The Christian believer affirms the existence of, aswell as his or her confidence in, the goodness of God, who haspromised him or her blessedness or freedom from the painfullimitations of mortality. It is only because the Christian believerthus “completes and satisfies himself in God”(WGL 363/46) that God is credited with the possession of allthat human beings lack. Luther, with his emphasis on God’s beingpro nobis or “for us”, was “the first tolet out the secret of the Christian faith” (WGL366/50), which is, at bottom, the assurance

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

From this recognition, Feuerbach goes on to develop an analysis of thedivine attributes, which he interprets in this context as “meansto the end of benevolence” (WGL 368/52). Here, and inFeuerbach’s later writings, the concepts of blessedness and thedrive-to-happiness seem to play a role analogous to the one played bythe concept of the species-essence inThe Essence ofChristianity. Whereas, in the latter work, divine attributes suchas omniscience and perfection were said to be attributes of the humanspecies-essence, in the section onSeligkeit toward the endof theTheogony, where Feuerbach develops a line of thoughtfirst introduced in the Luther book, many of these same attributes aresaid to characterize the state of blessedness itself. “God isonly the foreword, blessedness the text of Christianity. Or: Themystery of divinity is first unveiled and revealed in the gospel ofblessedness” (T 308). The thesis here is that theattributes of the Christian God are determined by the most fundamentalwishes of the Christian believer. For example, Godquacreator is first and foremost omnipotent, but omnipotence is ascribedto God only because it is necessary for God to be omnipotent in orderfor God to be able to exercise his benevolence toward the faithful bysupplying them with what they lack, including eternal life. There isno lack that cannot be satisfied, and no ultimate harm that canbefall, the person who is the object of the benevolence of anomnipotent being. On this account, the divine attributes aredetermined by human needs. These are determined, in turn, by thepsycho-physical constitution of human beings as self-conscioussubjects constrained by natural limitations from which they have anurgent wish to be liberated. In the final analysis, belief in divineomnipotence is said be motivated, not by any specific wish, but ratherby “the unspecific over-all wish that there be in general nonatural necessity; no limitations, no opposition to the human beingand to human wishes” (WGL 372/59).

Feuerbach, whose conception ofSeligkeit or blessedness seemsto have been influenced by Augustine’s account offelicitas inThe City of God, defines blessedness atone point as freedom from sin, sensual drives, “the oppressionof matter”, death, and the limitations of nature in general(WGL 403/103). Whereas the God of Christianity had previouslybeen identified by Feuerbach as an alienated projection of the humanspecies-essence, here God is defined instead as the realizeddrive-to-happiness of the Christian believer. To say that belief inGod is motivated or caused by the human drive-to-happiness is notnecessarily to deny that attributes ascribed to God are attributesderived from human nature. It is, however, in any case to affirm thatthe ascription to God of the perfections of the human species-essenceserves an underlying psychological need that is itself determined bythe dependence of human beings upon nature, and their awareness ofthis dependence in the form of powerful hopes and fears that give riseto belief in supernatural agencies and efforts to secure theirblessings.

Two years after the publication of the Luther book, Feuerbachpublished another short book entitledThe Essence ofReligion, the core ideas in which are further developed in theLectures. Here, Feuerbach explains that, because Christiansthemselves do not worship such things as the sun and the moon, butinstead worship “will, intelligence, consciousness as divinebeings 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 tocorrect by augmenting the slogan encapsulating his doctrine from“theology is anthropology” to “theology isanthropology ‘and physiology’”(VWR 28/21). This modification reflects a new emphasis inFeuerbach’s later writings on the ontological dependence ofhuman consciousness upon the physical human organism, which itselfexists only in relation to the natural order of which it is apart—a relation mediated, or, to be more precise,revealed, by the senses.

The Essence of Religion begins with the striking claims that1) the feeling of dependence is the “ground” of religion,and that 2) the original object of this feeling, i.e., in the historyof religion, is nature. Feuerbach defines the feeling of dependenceas

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

This feeling can manifest itself negatively as fear, to whichFeuerbach refers at one point as “a feeling of dependency on anobject without which I am nothing, which has the power to destroyme” (VWR 39/31); but the feeling of dependent can alsomanifest itself positively in the form of celebratory joy andexaltation. Feuerbach finds both of these powerful emotions expressedin the act of sacrifice, which he takes to be the most characteristicpractice of nature religions (as opposed, presumably, to prayer as thecharacteristic act of “spiritual”, i.e., monotheistic,religions). In addition to filling a “gap” in the argumentput forward inThe Essence of Christianity by emphasizing thedependence of “the human essence” upon “the essenceof nature”, Feuerbach also sought inThe Essence ofReligion to identify features shared in common by what he calls“nature religions”, on the one hand, and“spiritual” religions like Christianity, on the other, andto clarify the relationship between these two kinds of religion.Feuerbach uses the term “nature religion” to refer boththe pagan religions of classical antiquity, and the religions ofvarious tribal peoples whose beliefs and practices were described forFeuerbach and his contemporaries by European travelers in journalssuch asDas Ausland, from which Feuerbach derived a number ofthe 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, humanindependence. If blessedness is the condition of not being subjectedto the restrictions imposed by nature on all finite, corporealindividuals subject to generation and corruption, then humanblessedness can be regarded as the final goal (Endzweck) ofreligion (WR 34). The gods are the objects of worship, andthe recipients of sacrifice, because they are the benefactors of humanbeings in the specific sense that they are imagined to have it intheir power to satisfy fundamental human wishes, including the wishnot to die. “Only a being who loves man and desires hishappiness [Seligkeit] is an object of human worship, ofreligion” (VWR 71/60). The sacrificial act is motivatedby the experience of need (Bedürfnis), which involvesthe simultaneous awareness both of one’s “non-being apartfrom nature”, and of one’s existence as a self-consciousbeing distinct from nature (WR 32). In theLectures,Feuerbach claims that the feeling of dependence on nature is the only“truly universal” designation for the “psychologicalor subjective ground of religion” (VWR 39/31). Thiscontinues to be the case even after nature has ceased to be the locusof divinity, and the origin of the visible world is sought in the willof a transcendent creator who brought forth the world into being fromnothing, and who is solely responsible for occurrences attributed bypolytheists to a multitude of divine agencies. The objectivecorrelates of the feeling of dependence, in the case of bothpolytheism and monotheism, are the really existing things and peoplewho are the objects of various human needs, physical andpsychological, at least some of which Feuerbach implicitly recognizes,especially in theTheogony, to be culturally determined.

Feuerbach’s description of the feeling of dependence asinvolving the awareness

that I am nothing without anot-I which is distinct from meyet intimately related to me, somethingother, which is atthe same time myown being (VWR 350/311)

reflects his understanding of nature as the totality of “thebeings [Wesen], things, [and] objects that man distinguishesfrom himself and his products” (WR 4). Nature, in otherwords, is coterminous with the non-human world, devoid ofconsciousness, will and sentiment. It includes such things as light,electricity, air, water, earth, and the plants and animals upon whichthe existence of human beings depends, but it also includes the humanorganism itself insofar as the effects produced by that organism areproduced unconsciously and involuntary. Nature is the “cause andground of man”; in human beings nature “becomes apersonal, conscious, intelligent (verständiges)being” (VWR 29/21). To say that human beings aredependent upon nature is to say, among other things, that nature,which is devoid of consciousness and intention, is what has causedhuman beings to exist, and that the same physical processes that haveproduced the human brain have also produced human consciousness. Whileall organisms are dependent upon nature for their existence, humanbeings are distinguished from other organisms by the extent of theirconscious awareness of this dependence. This awareness Feuerbach findsexpressed in the earliest forms of cultic activity, including theearliest forms of nature religion focused, for example, on the changesof the seasons, and in the offering of sacrifice to divine beingsassociated with various aspects of the natural world. Although natureis the original object of religion, this goes unrecognized initiallybecause human beings do not at first distinguish themselves fromnature or vice versa. The forces of nature are instead personified,and naturally occurring events are attributed to the human-likemotivations of spirits and gods. Religion, according to Feuerbach,exhibits the following contradiction: When it conceives of itselftheistically, it mistakenly thinks of God as a thoroughly non-humanbeing (i.e., one whose existence and attributes in no way depends onthe existence and attributes of human beings), and when in conceivesof itself as nature religion, it mistakenly attributes consciousnessand will to what is in fact entirely non-human.

Further analysis of the feeling of the dependence leads Feuerbach toconclude that this feeling itself presupposes “egoism as theultimate hidden ground of religion” (VWR91–92/79). Here he reasons that, if human beings were notsubject to powerful psychological drives which compel them to expandand develop their natural powers, including most fundamentally thedrive-to-self-preservation, they would not experience the limitationsimposed upon them by nature as painful and restricting.“Life isegoism” (EEWR 82)insofar as the fundamental drive of all living things, including thehuman organism, is the drive to self-preservation(Selbsterhaltungstrieb). Nevertheless, what Feuerbach calls“human egoism” doesn’t seem to be the same thingeither as psychological egoism (the claim that everyone always actsfrom self-interest) or ethical egoism (the claim that“good” is whatever serves my own interests). Feuerbachwrites that, by “human egoism” he means

man’s love for himself, that is, love of the human essence, thelove that spurs him on to satisfy and develop all the impulses andtendencies without whose satisfaction and development he neither isnor can be a true, complete human being. (VWR60–61/50)

This type of self-love, which warrants comparison with, but is not thesame as, Rousseau’samour de soi, encompasses love ofone’s fellow human beings, apart from whom one cannot eithercultivate or satisfy the ethical, intellectual and aesthetic impulsesand capacities in which one’s essential humanity consists, andto whose well-being one’s own is thus inextricably linked.

Feuerbach’s book,Theogony according to the Sources ofClassical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity (1857), which is theproduct of six years of close engagement with Hebrew, Greek, and Latintexts from antiquity, exemplifies the vastness of Feuerbach’shumanistic erudition. Feuerbach considered it his “simplest,most complete, mature work” (GW 20: 292). It may not bea mere coincidence that the period of Feuerbach’s engagement inthese philological labors was the same period when one of his closestcorrespondents was Emil Ernst Gottfried von Herder, the son of JohannGottfried von Herder, whose introduction to the study of theologyFeuerbach had read as a young man while he himself was learning Hebrewgrammar in preparation for his matriculation in the theologicalfaculty at the University of Heidelberg. Like the older Herder, whoconceived of the poetry of the Hebrew Bible as a product of the geniusof humanity in its childhood, Feuerbach turned to theIliadand theOdyssey, which he thought of as theUrstätten or “original sites” ofanthropology, and to the Hebrew scriptures, for clues to the originsof belief in the gods and in God. Large portions of the book consisteither of 1) careful philological analyses of individual passagesselected, for example, from theIliad or theOdyssey, or from the creation accounts in Genesis, or else ofa verse from Pindar or Ovid, or a passage from the New Testament; or2) quotations from a wide range of Greco-Roman, patristic, rabbinicaland medieval sources which Feuerbach cites in support of the centralexplanatory claim of the book. This claim is that the psychologicalorigin of belief in the gods and in God is the powerful human wish forhappiness or blessedness conceived as a state of freedom from the“limitations” (Grenze) that nature imposes onhuman existence, which are experienced by the human subject in theform of powerful feelings of hope and fear.

In seeking to substantiate the claim that the wish is the fundamentalreligious phenomenon, Feuerbach analyzes several theophanies from theIliad in an effort to show that the gods make theirappearances in the epic in response to petitions directed to them byhumans. Insofar as the ends toward which the actions of the gods inthe Homeric epics are directed are determined by the wishes of themortals who invoke their blessings and curses, the gods act as therepresentatives or deputies of (Vertreter) of human self-love(T 12). “The wish is a slave of necessity, but a slavewith the will to freedom” (T 47), and the gods are theimaginary embodiment of human freedom from the restrictions offinitude. Feuerbach arrives at this conclusion through his analysis ofacts of petitionary prayer in theIliad and their role inwish fulfillment, and cites in this context the observation of theByzantine Homeric commentator, Eustathius of Thessalonica, that Homerallows no just request made of the gods to remain unfulfilled. In thedivine-human relationship, it is the mortals who desire, strive, andwill; and it is the gods who complete or bring to fruition these humanintentions to the extent that the conditions for their satisfactionare beyond human control (T 19). While the wish itself is apurely subjective psychological occurrence, the completion of theaction to which a wish might give rise, or the achievement of the endtoward which the wish is directed, depends upon external circumstancesthat may or may not be conducive to the fulfillment of the wish.Anticipating a similar observation more famously made by thepioneering field anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, it is undersuch circumstances, where failure is a distinct possibility, and amatter of urgency hangs in the balance, that the gods are invoked andtheir blessings sought in order to bring some human endeavor to asuccessful completion. The gods are beings who are able to do or knowwhat 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, butrather from a practical concern to influence the course of events thattranspire within it. Belief in gods thus presupposes a desire thatthere should exist beings capable of guaranteeing the success of humanendeavors, and faith is preceded by hope in the logical order ofthings religious. If human beings did not have a powerful desire, say,to be liberated from bondage or to avoid death, belief in the PromisedLand or in immortality would never have arisen. In biblical terms,faith in God is trust in what God promises, but what is promised byGod is what is sought after or desired by human beings. The religioussignificance of God’s promises is contingent upon theircorrespondence to deep-seated human desires. Whereas, inTheEssence of Religion, Feuerbach referred to the feeling ofdependence as the “ground” of religion, he now attributesthe psychological origin of the gods to the wish. The wish, consideredas an act of striving for what remains beyond the limits of humanpower to achieve, is theogonic in the sense that theophanies (i.e.,manifestations of the gods or of God) described in the Homeric epicsand in the Bible, considered as narrative events, occur as responsesto powerful human wishes or needs, or else as expressions of gratitudeand celebration in response to occasions where these needs arebelieved to have been met through the cooperation or assistance of adivine agency (T 32). The gods owe their existence to“sensualism and materialism” insofar as they are theproduct of the material needs of finite, embodied human subjects.

Interesting sections of theTheogony are devoted to analyzingthe role of the gods in the consecration of oaths, and to the originsof conscience in the aggrieved will-to-happiness of the other.Feuerbach attributes belief in divine justice to the wish that theperson by whom one has been harmed should suffer harm themselves(T 103). He appeals to the mythological representations ofthe furies and of Medusa as evidence of the “sensual”origins of the voice of conscience (T 136), which presupposesa powerful, involuntary sense of sympathy with the suffering of personwho has suffered, or stands to suffer from, one’s actions. It is“only in his egoism that man has a criterion for distinguishingbetween right and writing” (T 140). At one point in theTheogony 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 anddifferent wishes, they tend also to worship new and differentdivinities. Whereas the ancient Greco-Roman pagans, and even theancient Hebrews, were mainly concerned to secure blessedness in theform of long life and temporal prosperity, the early Christians soughttheir blessedness in eternity or “eternal life”. Feuerbachclosely associates this shift from a concern with temporal blessednessto a concern with eternal blessedness with the Christian emphasis oncreation ex nihilo, which he contrasts both with the Hebrew account ofcreation as involving the forming and ordering of pre-existentelements, and the limitation of the Greco-Roman gods to being able toprolong the lives of mortals, and securing their blessedness in thislife, without being able to confer immortality upon them. The freedomfrom natural necessity ascribed by early Christian thinkers to God isinterpreted by Feuerbach as an expression of the wish of theseChristians to be free themselves from the constraints of materialexistence.

7. The Naturalization of Ethics in Feuerbach’s Last Writings

As noted in the preceding section, Feuerbach’s espousal ofsensuousness coincides with a movement toward nominalism that isreflected in a shift of emphasis from the human species to theindividual human being in his later works on religion. One way thatthis shift shows itself is in a striking change in Feuerbach’sestimation of egoism. Among the many issues that remain unclear inFeuerbach’s later writings is what the expression “humanessence” can mean for him once he has abandoned thespecies-ontology of his earlier writings and declared himself anominalist. That pivotal question aside, it is at least clear that inPrinciples, and in his later writings on ethics, Feuerbachcontinues to emphasize the importance of inter-subjectivity and of theI-Thou relationship. However, these are no longer conceived inidealistic terms, as they had been previously, includingFeuerbach’s doctoral dissertation, where he had spoken ofthought as a species-activity in which the individual thinking subjectparticipates. In his later writings on ethics, Feuerbach continues toaffirm that human beings are essentially communal and dialogicalbeings, both with respect to our cognitive and linguistic capacities,and with respect to the range of moral sentiments we experience towardone another, but the communality in which the human essence ismanifested 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 asan incomplete essay on ethics, is the concept of theGlückseligkeitstrieb or drive-to-happiness. Toward theend of thePreliminary Theses, after affirming that allscience must be grounded in nature, and that doctrines not so groundedremain purely “hypothetical”, Feuerbach had gone on tonote that this is especially true of the doctrine of freedom, and hehad assigned to the new philosophy the task of “naturalizingfreedom” (VT 262/172). This is one of the tasks towhich he applies himself in “On Spiritualism andMaterialism”, where he takes aim at“supernaturalistic” philosophers, among whom he countsKant, Fichte and Hegel, who ascribe to human beings a noumenal oruniversal will that is “independent of all natural laws andnatural causes and thus of all sensuous motivations[Triebfedern]” (SM 54). In arguing that it ispossible for the will to be determined by the mere form of the morallaw, independently of any sensible inclination, Kant had identifiedthe will with pure practical reason. In doing so, Feuerbach argues, heturned the will into a mere abstraction. For Feuerbach, it makes nosense to speak of a timeless will devoid of a volitional impulsedirected toward some particular object.

The concepts of drive (Trieb), happiness, sensation and willare closely interrelated in the account of agency that Feuerbach seeksto develop in these last writings. Feuerbach regards sensation as the“first condition of willing” (M 366), sincewithout sensation there is no pain or need or sense of lack againstwhich for the will to strive to assert itself. At one point, hedefines happiness as the “healthy, normal” state ofcontentment or wellbeing experienced by an organism that is able tosatisfy the needs and drives that are constitutive of its“individual, characteristic nature and life” (M366). The drive-to-happiness is a drive toward the overcoming of amultitude of painful limitations by which the finite, corporealsubject 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 differentobjects in which people seek their happiness (SM 70). Amongthe specific drives to which Feuerbach refers in his later writingsare the drive-to-self-preservation, the sexual drive, thedrive-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 asthe “ground” of both the will and of consciousness(SM 153), and he emphasizes that action results from theforce with which a dominant drive succeeds in subduing otherconflicting drives that may reassert themselves under alteredcircumstances (SM 91). Feuerbach also occasionallydistinguishes between healthy and unhealthy drives, though he haslittle to say about the standard or criterion he uses for making sucha distinction.

Whereas happiness involves the experience of a sense of contentment onthe part of a being that is able to satisfy the drives that arecharacteristic of its nature, the inability to satisfy these drivesresults in various forms of discontent, aggravation, pain andfrustration. The German word, “Widerwille”, meansdisgust or repugnance, but literally it involves not-wanting or,etymologically, “willing against”, and this, Feuerbachcontends, is the most rudimentary form of willing.

Every malady (Übel), every unsatisfied drive, everyunassuaged longing, every sense of absence [i.e., of a desired object]is an irritating or stimulating injury and negation of thedrive-to-happiness innate in each living and sensing being, and thecountervailing affirmation of the drive-to-happiness, accompanied byrepresentations and consciousness, is what we call “will”.(M 367)

Freedom of the will, as Feuerbach conceives of it here, is freedomfrom the evils (Übeln) by which my drive-to-happiness isrestricted, and is contingent upon the availability to me of thespecific means required for overcoming these restrictions.

Another way that Feuerbach seeks to “naturalize freedom”is by developing a naturalistic account of conscience according towhich the voice of conscience, which imposes restrictions on my owndrive-to-happiness, functions in doing so as the advocate for thedrive-to-happiness of “the I apart from me, the sensuousThou” (SM 80), who has been or stands to be harmed bythose actions from which I can have a moral obligation to refrain fromperforming. Where there is no harm or benefit, Feuerbach contends,there is no criterion for distinguishing right from wrong (SM75–76). Feuerbach agrees with Schopenhauer in regardingcompassion (Mitleid) as a basic source of moral motivation,but rejects Schopenhauer’s association of compassion with therenunciation of the will to live. The purpose of morality and law isto harmonize the drive-to-happiness of the various individual membersof a moral community.

My right is the legal recognition of my own drive-to-happiness, myduty is the drive-to-happiness of the other that demands recognitionfrom me. (SM 74)

The moral will, as Feuerbach conceives of it here, is not adisinterested will. It is rather “that will which seeks to causeno 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 antipathytoward my own suffering, whoever does away with self-interest (i.e.,refuses to recognize moral value in actions motivated byself-interest) does away at the same time with compassion(Mitleid).

Bibliography

References to Feuerbach’s published writings are to the criticaledition of his collected works orGesammelte Werke (hereafterGW) edited by Werner Schuffenhauer, Berlin: Akademie Verlag,1981–. Feuerbach’s writings are cited in the text usingthe following system of abbreviation. Page numbers refer to therelevant volume ofGW as indicated below. In cases where twopage numbers are separated by a slash, the second refers to therelevant translation as indicated below. Although I have made use ofthese translations, in many cases I have preferred to provide myown.

Feuerbach Works

• [AP] “Einige Bemerkungen über denAnfangder Philosophie von D.J.F. Reiff” (1841) =GW, v.9, 143–153 = “On ‘The Beginning ofPhilosophy,’” inFB 135–144.
• [B] “Zur Beurteilung der SchriftDas Wesen desChristentums” (1842) =GW v. 9, 229–242. Notranslation available.
• [EEWR]Ergänzungen und Erläuterungen zum“Wesen der Religion” (1846) =GW v. 10,80–121.
• [FB]The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings of LudwigFeuerbach, trans. with an introduction by Z. Hanfi, Garden City,N.Y., Doubleday, 1972.
• [GPZ]Grundsätze der Philosophie derZukunft =GW v. 9, 264–341 =Principles of thePhilosophy of the Future, trans. M. Vogel with an intro by T.E.Wartenberg, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986.
• [GTU]Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit ausden Papieren eines Denkers (1830),GW v. 1,175–515 =Thoughts on Death and Immortality from the Papersof a Thinker, trans. with intro and notes by J.A. Massey,Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
• [GW] Feuerbach, L. (1981–),GesammelteWerke, W. Schuffenhauer (ed.), Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
• [KPP]Zur Kritik der “positivenPhilosophie” (1839) =GW, v. 8, 181–207. Notranslation available.
• [M] “Zur Moralphilosophie” (1868), W.Schuffenhauer (ed.), in Braun, 1994: 353–430. No translationavailable.
• [NV] “Grundsätze der Philosophie:Notwendigkeit einer Veränderung” (date uncertain), inFeuerbach, 1996: 119–135 = “The Necessity of a Reform ofPhilosophy”, inFB, 145–152. This unpublishedmanuscript is not included in any of the volumes ofGW thathave appeared to date.
• [SM] “Über Spiritualismus und Materialismus,besonders in Beziehung auf die Willensfreiheit” (1866) =GW v. 11, 53–186. No translation available.
• [VGP]Vorlesungen über die Geschichte derneueren Philosophie, E. Thies (ed.), Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 1974. This volume contains notes for lectures on thehistory of modern philosophy delivered by Feuerbach in Erlangen duringthe 1835/36 academic year.
• [VWR]Vorlesungen über das Wesen derReligion =GW v. 6 =Lectures on the Essence ofReligion, trans. R. Manheim, New York: Harper & Row,1967.
• [VT] “Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation derPhilosophie” (1842) =GW v. 9, 243–263.
• [WC]Das Wesen des Christentums (1841) =GW, v. 5 =The Essence of Christianity, trans. G.Eliot with an intro by K. Barth and a foreword by H.R. Niebuhr, NewYork: Harper Torchbooks, 1957.
• [WGL]Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luthers =GW, v. 9, 353–412 =The Essence of Faith Accordingto Luther, trans. and with an introduction by M. Cherno, NewYork: Harper & Row, 1967.
• [WR]Das Wesen der Religion (1846) =GWv. 10, 3–19.
• [T]Theogonie nach den Quellen des klassischen,hebräischen und christlichen Altertums (1857) =GWv. 7.

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Other Internet Resources

• Harvey, Van, “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach”,TheStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 edition), EdwardN. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/>. [This was the previous entry on Feuerbach in theStanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy — see theversion history.]
• International Society of Feuerbach Researchers
• Ludwig Feuerbach Society (Germany).
• Ludwig Feuerbach Archive
• Feuerbach, entry at the Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of WesternTheology.

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