The German philosopher Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872) is noted for his criticism of orthodox religion. It may be said that he humanized God while deifying man.

Ludwig Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804, in Landshut, Bavaria. He studied at the University of Heidelberg and then switched from theology to philosophy and moved to the University of Berlin, where he became a diligent student of G. W. F. Hegel. In 1828 he received his doctorate at the University of Erlangen.

Feuerbach's first publication was an essay entitled Thoughts about Death and Immortality (1830). Because it was so controversial at that time to deny the immortality of the soul, he published his work anonymously. In the following years he tried unsuccessfully to obtain a professorship. Even his scholarly books were of no help: From Bacon to Spinoza (1833), Leibniz (1836), and Pierre Bayle (1838). In 1839 his criticism of Hegel became evident. Later he vigorously began his criticism of religion.

Feuerbach's primary work is The Essence of Christianity (1841), one of the first attempts at understanding religion from a strictly human point of view. He holds that the sources of religion are human wishes, imagination, feelings, emotions, and, above all, man's desire to elucidate his own essence. Accordingly, Feuerbach sees in God the purified essence of man himself and the unlimited ideal of man's capabilities. He insists that religion is necessary for man's search for himself and that it separates man from the animals. Furthermore, he concedes that among all religions Christianity has a special mandate, seen in the doctrine that God became man. However, for him it was not God who became man; in fact, it is man who intends to conceive his own real essence in Jesus Christ. Consequently, Feuerbach suggests that theology and Christology should be transmuted into anthropology, into a theory about the divine nature of man.

Besides shaking the foundation of theology, Feuerbach outlined the principles of new ways of philosophizing: Preparatory Theses on the Reform of Philosophy (1842) and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843). In these he explained that the basis of philosophy is not reason and abstraction but human sensuality, sexuality, and emotions. He was one of the first in modern times to emphasize the problem of communication; hence, he understood the human ego as a relation to another human being, to a "thou."

In 1844 Feuerbach revised The Essence of Christianity. Further writings clarified his position, among them The Essence of Faith according to Luther (1844) and The Essence of Religion (1846). Because of his strong criticism of religion he was never given opportunity to join any faculty in Germany. He lived in an idyllic retreat at Bruckberg and in 1857 published his Theogony. He died at Rechenberg on Sept. 13, 1872.

Further Reading

Feuerbach's life and thought are examined in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1895; trans. 1934); William B. Chamberlain, Heaven Wasn't His Destination (1941); and Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (1947). Recommended introductions to various aspects of Feuerbach's writings are Karl Barth's introductory essay to Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1957) and Manfred H. Vogel, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1965).

(1804-72) Born in Bavaria, the son of a distinguished jurist and administrator, Ludwig Feuerbach studied theology at Heidelberg and philosophy under Hegel in Berlin. His first post-doctoral published work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, published in 1830, caught the attention of the police and censors and Feuerbach was barred from all future university posts. He married and moved to Bruckberg, where he lived in quiet isolation and material comfort for many years. He was most productive in the 1840s, publishing The Essence of Christianity in 1841, as well as, somewhat later, the Preliminary Theses for the Reform of Philosophy and the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Future. These works quickly established Feuerbach as the mentor of the left-Hegelian movement. He gave that movement a common conception of philosophy as nothing but the process of human self-understanding. He also provided a clear notion of human nature in terms of species-being. Finally, he made possible a radical materialist critique of all religion and religious belief, in particular, perhaps, Judaism. Marx's criticism of Feuerbach's philosophy in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach constituted the first statement of historical materialism.

— John Halliday

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Feuerbach, Ludwig (Landshut, 1804-72, Rechenberg nr. Nuremberg), the son of a criminologist who became a judge, studied theology at Heidelberg, and philosophy under Hegel at Berlin. In 1828 he became a lecturer at Erlangen University, but resigned in 1832 because of his unorthodox views on religion. His earliest work, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, appeared anonymously in 1830. In his most influential work, Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), published under his own name in 1843, he maintained that the dogmas and beliefs of Christianity are figments of the human imagination, fulfilling a need inherent in human nature. He viewed theology as a branch of anthropology, and religion as ‘the dream of the human spirit’. In this sense he conceded their evolutionary function: ‘Das Bewußtsein Gottes ist das Selbst-bewußtsein des Menschen, die Erkenntnis Gottes die Selbsterkenntnis des Menschen.’ His conception of a trinity in man, a unity of reason, love, and will, underlies his phrase that Man ‘ist, was er ist nur durch sie’ which has been turned into a well-known pun, Man ‘ist, was er ißt (eats)’. Feuerbach was most influential in the 1840s, and G. Keller was foremost among the writers susceptible to his views.

Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (1804-72) German philosopher and anthropologist. Born in Landshut, Bavaria, Feuerbach studied theology and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin. He enjoyed only a sporadic teaching career, and lived mainly on income derived from his wife's interest in a pottery factory. His philosophical writings were fired by a perception that Hegel's system had failed to shake itself free from crippling rationalistic and religious elements. It is therefore itself but a stage in the true emergence of selfconsciousness, in a humanistic, scientific, ‘philosophy of the future’. Feuerbach's chequered career was the outcome of his conviction that religion is a ‘dream of the human mind’, or an understandable but distorting projection of our emotional needs: ‘Christ is the love of mankind for itself embodied in an image.’ This sceptical and anthropological approach to religion is indeed similar in spirit to that of Hume and Voltaire, but proved more explosive in the religious and absolutist atmosphere of the mid-19th century. Feuerbach stands for opposition to any philosophical system-building in favour of an empirical study of the way persons respond to the world and to each other. His aphorism, ‘man is what he eats’, became a useful political slogan for subsequent radicals. Ethically Feuerbach believed that human relations vindicate a close, communitarian spirit in which divisions between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ become dissolved. His early writings include many contributions to the Hallesche Jahrbücher of which he was joint editor, and which had a decisive influence on the development of secular and political, or left-wing, Hegelianism. His most important work was Das Wesen des Christentums (1846), which was translated by the scholar and novelist George Eliot as The Essence of Christianity, 1854. Eliot was paid two shillings a page. She herself was more taken with Feuerbach's impassioned descriptions of self-sacrificing, sacred, self-sufficing and spontaneous love than with his humanism. Marx's Theses on Feuerbach combines an appreciation of Feuerbach's dialectical upstaging of Hegel with recognition that Feuerbach himself falls short of properly resolving self-consciousness, and its religious projections, into fundamental social and economic forces. Engels said of Feuerbach that the lower half of him was materialistic, but the upper half an idealist.

(lūt'vĭkh ändrā'äs foi'ərbäkh) , 1804–72, German philosopher, educated at Heidelberg and Berlin; son of Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach. At first a Hegelian, he abandoned absolute idealism for naturalistic materialism. He asserted that religious feeling is simply a product of man's yearnings and maintained that the proper study of philosophy is not what transcends experience but man himself and nature, on which humanity rests. Although Feuerbach approaches materialism in his later works, man for him is not to be regarded as simply a product of matter. Feuerbach's most important works were Das Wesen des Christentums (1841, tr. by George Eliot, The Essence of Christianity, 1957 ed.); Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (2 vol., 1833–37); and Gottheit, Freiheit und Unsterblichkeit (1866).

Bibliography

See E. Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (1970); M. Wartofsky, Feuerbach (1982); C. A. Wilson, Feuerbach and the Search for Otherness (1989).

Quotes:

"I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one."

"If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism -- at least in the sense of this work -- is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature."

"Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity."

"The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane."

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