Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was born in 1804 in the Bavarian town of Landshut to a family of a famous criminologist. He studied theology at the University of Heidelberg, then philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he attended Hegel’s lectures for four years. It was to Hegel that he dedicated his dissertation “On the One, Universal, and Infinite Reason” in 1828. At the same time, he began his teaching career at the University of Erlangen. But after his authorship of the extremely bold work “Thoughts on Death and Immortality”, published anonymously in 1830, was revealed, Feuerbach was dismissed from the university. Then he concentrated on historical and philosophical research: “The History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza” (1833), “On Leibniz” (1837), “On Pierre Bayle” (1838), reviews of Hegel’s “History of Philosophy” and Stahl’s “Philosophy of Right”. At this time, his philosophical aphorisms “Writer and Man” (1834) were published. Having moved in 1837 for 25 years to the small village of Bruckberg in Thuringia, Feuerbach took an active part in the publication of the Young Hegelian “Hallische Jahrbucher”.
It is believed that in 1839, in his work “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” he switched to materialistic positions: “The theme of all my later works is man as a subject of thought, whereas previously thought itself was a subject for me and was considered by me as something self-sufficient” (1: 2, 881). But this was a kind of, as Feuerbach himself would call it, anthropological materialism, based primarily on a critique of Christianity. A number of works from this period—“On Philosophy and Christianity” (1839), “Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy” (1842)—were banned. Published in 1841, The Essence of Christianity had a powerful impact on the minds of his contemporaries, including the Russian public (at various times, N. Stankevich, A. Herzen, N. Chernyshevsky, N. Dobrolyubov, G. Plekhanov, V. Lenin wrote about Feuerbach) and immediately made Feuerbach famous. Feuerbach outlined his project of philosophy in more detail in his works Fundamental Provisions of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) and The Essence of Religion (1845). Feuerbach successfully delivered his Lectures on the Essence of Religion to students at Heidelberg University for three months from December 1848 to March 1849, but not in the university building, but in the town hall, and he was never allowed to continue teaching. Later works – “Theogony” (1857), “On Spiritualism and Materialism, especially in their relation to free will” (1866), “Eudaemonism” (1869) – were no longer so popular. In his last years, when his wife’s factory went bankrupt, Feuerbach was forced to move with his family to Rachenberg near Nuremberg, he joined the Social Democratic Party, and studied the works of Marx. Feuerbach died in 1872, and thousands of workers attended his funeral in Nuremberg.
From his first works, Feuerbach succeeded in anticipating the philosophical problems of the 20th century with its so-called subjectivist attention to human nature, to the idea of universal human generic cultural immortality. Explanations of this attention are formed in Feuerbach gradually – with the development of criticism of Hegelian philosophy, under the influence of which he first writes about divine infinity as the “vital first cause of man”. As he himself says about his philosophical evolution, “my first thought was God, the second – reason, the third and last – man: the subject of the deity is reason, and the subject of reason is man” (1: 1, 165). Feuerbach became one of the first German philosophers of the 19th century who not only doubted the validity of Hegel’s universal philosophical system, but – and this is the most interesting thing in Feuerbach’s philosophy – attempted to propose a fundamentally new subject and method of philosophy: “the new philosophy transforms man, including nature as the basis of man, into the only, universal and highest subject of philosophy, thus transforming anthropology, including physiology, into a universal science” (1:1, 202). Thus, the entire philosophy of the New Age retains its claim to be scientific, and this task is solved by choosing a subject that would be both universal and specific – man. This largely determined some inaccuracies in the reasoning of one of the pioneers of the post-Hegelian era. Feuerbach based his new philosophical project on the anthropological principle.
The anthropological principle should, according to Feuerbach, remove those internal problems that arose in Hegelian philosophy, which “perniciously” combined the demand for scientificity and rationality with religion. The debates about the personality of God and the immortality of the soul – the debates about the orthodoxy of Hegelian philosophy, which led to the split of Hegelianism – are the most obvious contradiction. Its cause is deeper – in Hegelian panlogism itself: “If there were no nature, logic, this immaculate virgin, would never have produced it from itself” (1:1, 243). Hegel’s universal philosophy is incapable of explaining natural individual things. Feuerbach reminds us that Hegel considered nature to be a realm of chance, unsuitable for the pure expression of a concept. The abstraction of a concept deprives science of the only object that, according to Feuerbach, is worthy of study – living nature. Nature is all concrete, individual, sensually perceived quality. That is why the main instrument of infinite knowledge is the senses: “I think with the help of the senses…” (1: 2, 17). It is the human senses, the main one of which is sight, that give an idea of the qualitative diversity of the world. Being without quality is a chimera: “only a definite, distinguishable, individual being is a real being” (1: 2, 635). Nature is diverse, and people can know it, quoting Goethe, only “in the aggregate” — through the efforts of many generations: “Truth is neither materialism, nor idealism, nor physiology, nor psychology; truth is only anthropology” (1: 1, 224). Feuerbach uniquely contrasts theory, which cannot explain everything, with the idea of practice as a common human experience associated with the inclusion of each individual in a common, lawful natural environment. This is how he understands the objectivity of scientific truth: “If I think according to the standard of the genus, then I think as a person can think in general and, therefore, each individual must think if he wants to think normally, lawfully and, therefore, truly. That which corresponds to the essence of the genus is true; that which contradicts it is false. There is no other law for truth” (1:2, 192).
At the same time, Feuerbach emphasizes the objectivity of the subject of knowledge: “My sensation is subjective, but its basis or cause is objective” (1:1, 572). The senses give all phenomena separately, the mind then puts everything in order on the basis of objectively existing connections and relationships that are shown by sensations: “only that thinking is real, objective, which is determined and corrected by sensory intuition; only in such a case is thinking the thinking of objective truth” (1:1, 196). In order to meet the universal task, we must get rid of Kantian apriorism and put Hegel’s philosophy on its feet: not nature should be considered as the other being of the spirit, but the spirit should be considered as the other being of nature.
It is from this nominalistic materialistic position that the criticism of existing religions, and above all Christianity, unfolds. The Young Hegelians D. Strauss and B. Bauer discussed the origin of the Gospel myths, ultimately sharing the positions of Hegel’s absolute idealism, offering a unique pantheistic interpretation of it. Feuerbach believes: “Whoever does not reject Hegel’s philosophy does not reject theology either. Hegel’s teaching that nature, reality, is posited by an idea, is only a rational expression of the theological teaching that nature is created by God, that a material being is created by an immaterial, that is, an abstract being” (1: 1, 128). The identity of Hegel’s absolute idealism and religion is in the opposition of thinking to a concrete individual being, a sensory thing. But if theology presents an abstract being as the personality of Christ, then idealism and Hegelian philosophy as the most developed form of idealism absolutizes thinking itself, reason. The merit of idealism, according to Feuerbach, is that it is ultimately about human thinking, about the human Self, which becomes a supra-worldly entity. And to some extent, idealism, from Feuerbach’s point of view, affirms the dignity of the human personality.
But in order to achieve a natural understanding of man, one must first eliminate psychophysical dualism in the understanding of human nature and introduce the real relationship: “being is the subject, thinking is the predicate” (1: 1, 128). The objective spatio-temporal existence of man is governed by natural laws. Human society also turns out to be a part of nature, existing according to the same laws. Therefore, the human being is understood not absolutely, but in its necessary connection with other such beings – “being precedes thinking … in thinking I am aware only of what I already am without thinking: not a being that is supposedly not based on anything, but a being based on another being” (1: 1, 566 – 567). Here we should pay attention to the ethical context of Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology – we will see how this will be realized in the positive, ethical part of his project. Causality, necessity and regularity are not the result of their introduction into nature by the human mind, on the contrary, the laws of reality turn out to be the laws of thought. These laws, according to Feuerbach, operate with immutability. This forced many researchers, first of all K. Marx, to criticize Feuerbach for the metaphysical and contemplative nature of his materialism. In the famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx points out that the task of the philosopher is not only to explain the world, but to transform it. And in the work “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” F. Engels considers Feuerbach’s philosophy as a continuation of the classical metaphysical tradition and criticizes his anthropological method of studying religion. From the point of view of Marxists, man in Feuerbach is not historical, sociality is dissolved in nature and subject to the laws of nature, practice is understood within the framework of stereotypes of “generic knowledge”, criticism of religion is abstract and presupposes the creation of a new religion.
Feuerbach himself considered religion to be the main subject of his research. He specifically notes that there is no special religious feeling with which a person is born. Feuerbach views religion anthropologically – as an attempt by a person to understand his nature. He notes that his “method is … to reduce everything supernatural to nature by means of man and to reduce everything superhuman to man by means of nature, but invariably relying only on visual, historical, empirical facts and examples” (1:1, 265 – 267). In this sense, Feuerbach writes about the religion of the future as the true religion of the natural man.
Man, as has been said, “is based on another being”, that is, man is dependent in the broadest sense of the word – on other people, on the elements of nature. All human emotions are connected with this dependence. His egoism and desire for happiness – that which explains human behavior – are also connected with the feeling of dependence. Religion, exploiting the image of man’s generic dependence on supernatural forces, becomes necessary, saving. Paradoxically, according to Feuerbach, man, striving to distract himself from the hardships of the real world, striving to fulfill his desire for happiness, turns to God, who is nothing other than another definition of man himself, his aspirations and hopes. In this sense, Feuerbach writes that “man is the beginning, man is the middle, man is the end of religion” (1: 2, 219). Turning to God, man turns to himself, to his ideas, to the result of the work of his own human fantasy.
For Feuerbach, religion is historical, it does not appear by chance, but is connected with man’s interest in his own nature, therefore there are various forms of religious beliefs. The reason for these differences is in the living conditions of people. Thanks to the power of imagination, man transforms his nature into a religious idea. “Natural” religion, paganism, is the religion of man merged with nature, completely dependent on it, and in it the specific natural conditions in which certain people live are deified. The emergence of the cult of various animals is also explained by the dependence of primitive cattle breeders or hunters on this or that type of animal. According to Feuerbach, religion depicts not the natural phenomenon or animal itself, but how human fantasy sees it – these are humanized images associated with specific desires and needs. Society brings new types of dependence into human life – on the law, on power, on public opinion, on morality. Power is increasingly concentrated, from Feuerbach’s point of view, both on earth and in the religious consciousness of man, where the one and all-powerful Christian God appears. Christianity therefore turns out to be the most powerful and most oppressive religion for man. And only enlightenment can free man from religious ideas and show that the achievement of desires does not depend on otherworldly forces.
Therefore, he writes about the future natural replacement of existing religious beliefs by a new natural religion of a free man, which will give a specific definition of human nature. He calls this religion the philosophy of the future, or eudaemonism, the doctrine of happiness. The desire for happiness lies at the basis of all human actions – a person selfishly tries to get what he considers good for himself, and to avoid what he considers misfortune for himself. The criterion for distinguishing the first from the second is sensation. Thus, on sensation is built “healthy, simple, straightforward and honest morality, human morality.” Feuerbach believes that egoism is a philosophical principle that presupposes harmony of interests. For Feuerbach, healthy egoism necessarily includes involvement in another, complicity and sympathy with him. True morality comes from the need for universal happiness. According to Feuerbach, universal love is the most important component of human nature. Therefore, another name for this project is the philosophy of love, the philosophy of I and You. Anticipating the philosophy of the Other in the 20th century, Feuerbach notes that a person exists only because he has some kind of relationship with another person, he is the one who somehow manifests himself in relation to another. Robinson not only cannot be happy on a desert island alone, he exists there only thanks to Friday: “I and You, subject and object, distinct and yet inseparably connected – this is the true principle of thinking and life, philosophy and physiology” (1:1, 575). Selfless love for another thus turns out to be a necessary element of happiness from the point of view of the principle of egoism. Without it, a person cannot realize himself as a person. True, Feuerbach wrote that this does not become obvious immediately, and therefore much educational work is required for a person to discover this definition of his own. However, he considered conflicts and struggles to be rather deviations from human nature, a consequence of human ignorance, just like religious superstitions.
Literature
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4. Elez J. Problems of Being and Thinking in the Philosophy of L. Feuerbach. Moscow, 1974.
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6. Nudling G. Ludwig Feuerbachs Religionsphilosophy. Paderborn, 1936.
7.Schilling W. Feuerbach and Religion. Munich, 1957