07/29/2020 – Who Was Feuerbach?

Who was Feuerbach? Christianity is anthropomorphism? What? Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. We’re going to get a little philosophical today and spend some time getting into a philosopher named Ludwig Feuerbach, from Germany in the mid-1800’s. His major work written in 1841 was The Essence of Christianity and it was huge. We’re going to first give a little background to the story before getting into the book and his major ideas.

Now there’s a lot going on in philosophy during this time frame that had huge implications for religion, especially for Christianity, and to a slightly lesser extent, Judaism. Feuerbach was writing at a time just after the one-two punch of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. Kant’s major works came in the late 1700’s, right around the time the United States was forming as a modern nation-state. Kant essentially kickstarted an entire philosophical way of thinking which became known as German Idealism: basically objects cannot be known in themselves, but only as they appear to a perceiver.

After Kant, Hegel arrived on the scene in the early 1800’s and brought the idea of philosophical self-consciousness to the forefront of the conversation. The mutual recognition of other self-conscious subjects creates an objective spirit or social matrix of reality which we then can all recognize. Collectively, Hegel referred to the absolute spirit which was ultimately responsible for the totality of reality, although this clearly was not the God of classical Christian theism.

After Hegel, this split into two major camps known as Right and Left Hegelianism. The Right felt that Hegel’s philosophy reflected Christian orthodoxy and also felt that politically, European societies were the pinnacle of all civilizations. The Left Hegelians, often referred to as the Young Hegelians, were more liberal and interpreted Hegel’s philosophy as freeing humanity both religiously and politically. This was immediately apparent in Feuerbach’s contemporary, David Strauss, when he published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, in 1835. This was a shocking work for its time as he was the first one to call into question the historical reliability of the gospel accounts in the New Testament using newly developed concepts in the also now-birthing academic field of history in Europe. Feuerbach then enters the fray in the Young Hegelian movement with his own shocking work, The Essence of Christianity.

First, a quick word on the English translator of both David Strauss’ Life of Jesus and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, George Eliot. George Eliot was the pen name of a woman named Mary Ann Evans. She was a novelist and poet who wanted to escape the stereotype of women’s writings – which is an interesting side story in itself.

The late D. Z. Phillips, one of my former professors, wrote that Feuerbach’s main idea was essentially the inversion of Hegel’s philosophy, “The inversion of Hegel’s philosophy consisted in the claim that its essences were, in fact, confused reifications of the real predicates in human existence,” and that religion “…replace[s] the mystifications of metaphysical existence with the realities of human existence.”

What the heck does that mean? Let's get into it.

For Feuerbach, consciousness is infinite. But consciousness of the object is the self-consciousness of man. Now the English translation uses the word ‘man’ because languages are limited. The words ‘woman’ or ‘man’ refer, for Feuerbach, to specific individual essences in a way that the general word ‘human’ does not. This is a problem in discussing his work because there is no equivalent gender-neutral word in the English language to describe this concept. So we’re going to do our best to struggle through this language deficiency.

So we have self-consciousness. Feuerbach says that in the perceptions of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; but in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. The main idea is that the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. This means that consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge.

Whatever religion consciously denies in reality, it unconsciously restores in God. Man – again, a specific, individual essence – projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject; he thinks of himself not as an object to himself, but as the object of an object, of another being than himself. Thus, Man is an object to God. Are you confused yet, or is this starting to make sense?

Our realities are therefore the realities of God, but in us they exist with limits, in God, without limits. The personality of God is the personality of man freed from all the conditions and limitations of Nature. Theism regards the Supreme Being as a personal being. For Feuerbach, all religions are abstractions; they are distinguished only in the form from which the abstraction is made.

Now, earlier in life he was attracted to Pantheism, basically that all reality is God in a non-personal form, but in The Essence of Christianity he makes one key difference. He says that Pantheism identifies man with Nature, whether with its visible appearance, or its abstract essence. Personalism isolates and separates him from Nature, and converts him from a part into the whole, into an absolute essence by himself. If humans are separated from Nature and if God is an anthropomorphic reflection of humans, that means God is separate from Nature and Pantheism is rejected.

Once this move is made, however, Feuerbach says man lost the capability of conceiving himself as a part of Nature, of the universe, opening the door for the ability of belief in miracles to be made possible since one no longer has to conform to the laws of nature. In Feuerbach’s view, humans view themselves as finite, limited creatures. But the sense of limitation is painful, and hence the individual frees himself from it by the contemplation of the perfect Being; in this contemplation he possesses what otherwise is missing. God is nothing else than the immediate unity of species and individuality, of the universal and individual being.

God is the idea of the species as an individual – the idea or essence of the species, which as a species, as universal being, as the totality of all perfections, of all attributes or realities, freed from all the limits which exist in the consciousness and feeling of the individual. This is how God becomes an individual, personal being. Essence and existence are identical in God; which means nothing else than that he is the idea, the essence of the species, conceived immediately as an existence, an individual.

Since the immediate identity of the species and the individual oversteps the limits of reason and Nature, it followed of course that this universal, ideal individual was declared to be a transcendent, supernatural, heavenly being. [angels singing]

How do we know that humans have done this? Feuerbach says that in the genesis of ideas, the first mode in which reflection on religion, or theology, makes the divine being a distinct being, and places him outside of man, is by making the existence of God the object of a formal proof. When we try to prove that God exists, we have already made him into an object, a reflection of our own self-consciousness. Another indication is that every religion creates its own idea of God and then unconsciously manufactures reasons why its God is different over against the god of other religions. In these ways we can see God has been both individualized and personalized.

Lastly, Feuerbach asserts that the idea of the existence of God first realizes itself in the idea of revelation, and the idea of revelation first realizes itself in the idea of personality. God is a personal being: -- this is the spell which charms the ideal into the real, the subjective into the objective. All predicates, all attributes of a personal being, and therefore of a being distinct from man and existing independently, appear immediately to be really none other than human. Hence, reflection gives rise to the idea of so-called anthropomorphisms. Anthropomorphisms are resemblances between God and man. The attributes of the divine and of the human being are not entirely the same, but clearly analogous.

Whew! Did you get all that? Feuerbach is often labeled an atheist, but he never liked this label, preferring to refer to himself as an anthropotheist. God exists, but only as a reflection, not as a metaphysical reality over and against us. In more technical language this became known as anthropological materialism.

So what is Feuerbach’s legacy? He represents a turning point in the European understanding of religion by critically analyzing the human foundation and turning Hegel’s philosophy upside down. He introduced themes which later heavily influenced Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, as well as Freud and Nietzsche.

In 1845 Karl Marx jotted down some notes in a notebook which were not discovered and published until over 40 years later in 1888 by his friend Engels. These became known as the Theses on Feuerbach. The main theme of these notes is that Marx complained that Feuerbach only went halfway. Feuerbach deconstructed religion into human activity, but then did not continue on to the next logical step of changing humanity. What is the practical outcome or response? Religion is still in the clouds, what about us down here on earth? Marx’s last statement in this notebook became a very famous quotation:

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”

Marx found Feuerbach’s view to be too abstract and disconnected from people’s real, lived lives.

Another criticism centers on how Feuerbach came to understand his concept of God. For example, ’God’ expresses not what we essentially are or could be, but all that we are not. God becomes the mirror in which we see and judge ourselves. God is really not a reflection of us, but what we lack. Thus, the idea that the infinity of God is a projection of the infinity of human consciousness, or the infinity of the species is not accurate. However, Feuerbach does say something like this when he talks about the difference between our limits and the projection of God sort of filling in the huge gap from our limitedness to God’s unlimitedness, so this critique might not work.

So what do you think about Feuerbach’s views? Is anthropotheism a good interpretation? Did humans create God, either consciously or unconsciously, throughout the entire course of past lived experiences? It’s an interesting question to say the least.

Well I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.