Who is feuerbach

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Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Your complimentary articles. You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please. For many people, Ludwig Feuerbach is the grey but necessary grit shoved between the foundation stones of Hegel and Marx in the edifice of modern philosophy.

This is hardly a fair fate for the man whose critique of religion revolutionized philosophical theology, and who then pushed that critique into an all-out war against philosophy itself every bit as dramatic as the critiques of Marx and Nietzsche later in the century.

Feuerbach was born on July 28, , in Landshut, Bavaria, into one of those large, broad-minded, and liberal German families that positively throve in the era before Bismarck. His brothers included a philologist, a mathematician, an archaeologist, and a jurist, so it is perhaps not too surprising that Ludwig would later make his name as a man whose watchword was the infinite potential and diversity of the human species.

Like many intellectuals of his time, Feuerbach arrived at philosophy via the gateway of theology. In , he attended Heidelberg University as a student of religion, but was soon lured to Berlin and the big-stakes philosophy being wrought by Schleiermacher and Hegel, both lecturers there. After five years of searching unsuccessfully for a permanent university post, Feuerbach fired off Thoughts on Death and Immortality in — a merciless, ironic, and downright fun broadside leveled at the Christian notion of personal immortality.

Feuerbach included several verses of the Prometheus-fragment as an epigram to his first book, in which he used the tools of Hegelian logic to develop a view of the divinity as One and All along lines laid out by Spinoza, Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme.

But this reconciliation, he argued, cannot occur as long as God continues to be thought of as an individual person existing independently of the world. Foreshadowing arguments put forward in his first book, Feuerbach went on in this letter to emphasize the need for. This, he proposed, would require prevailing ways of thinking about time, death, this world and the beyond, individuality, personhood and God to be radically transformed within and beyond the walls of academia. Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these.

This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. In the introduction to Thoughts Feuerbach assumes the role of diagnostician of a spiritual malady by which he claims that modern moral subjects are afflicted. Rather than consisting of lifeless matter to which motion is first imparted by the purposeful action of an external agent, Feuerbach argues that nature contains within itself the principle of its own development.

But the immeasurable multiplicity of systems within systems that results from this activity constitutes a single organic totality. Nature is ground and principle of itself, or—what is the same thing, it exists out of necessity, out of the soul, the essence of God, in which he is one with nature. God, on this view, is not a skilled mechanic who acts upon the world, but a prolific artist who lives in and through it.

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

Thus, being and non-being, or life and death, are equally constitutive of the existence of finite entities throughout the entire course of their generation and destruction. Everything that exists has an essence that is distinct from its existence. Although individuals exist in time and space, their essences do not. Essence in general is timeless and unextended. Feuerbach nevertheless regards it as a kind of cognitive space in which individual essences are conceptually contained.

It is by means of Empfindung or sense experience that sentient beings are able to distinguish individuals from one another, including, in some instances, individuals that share the same essence. Experience, in other words, is essentially fleeting and transitory, and its contents are incommunicable. What we experience are the perceivable features of individual objects. It is through the act of thinking that we are able to identify those features through the possession of which different individuals belong to the same species, with the other members of which they share these essential features in common.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. Pure spirit is nothing but this thinking activity, in which the individual thinker participates without himself or herself being the principal thinking agent.

That thoughts present themselves to the consciousness of individual thinking subjects in temporal succession is due, not to the nature of thought itself, but to the nature of individuality, and to the fact that individual thinking subjects, while able to participate in the life of spirit, do not cease in doing so to exist as corporeally distinct entities who remain part of nature, and are thus not pure spirit.

A biological species is both identical with and distinct from the individual organisms that make it up. The species has no existence apart form these individual organisms, and yet the perpetuation of the species involves the perpetual generation and destruction of the particular individuals of which it is composed.

Similarly, Spirit has no existence apart from the existence of individual self-conscious persons in whom Spirit becomes conscious of itself i. Just as the life of a biological species only appears in the generation and destruction of individual organisms, so the life of Spirit involves the generation and destruction of these individual persons.

Viewed in this light, the death of the individual is necessitated by the life of infinite Spirit. Death is just the withdrawal and departure of your objectivity from your subjectivity, which is eternally living activity and therefore everlasting and immortal. Arguing thus, Feuerbach urged his readers to acknowledge and accept the irreversibility of their individual mortality so that in doing so they might come to an awareness of the immortality of their species-essence, and thus to knowledge of their true self, which is not the individual person with whom they were accustomed to identify themselves.

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

The understanding of reason as one and universal embodied in the works discussed in the preceding section also informs the approach taken by Feuerbach to the history of philosophy in the three previously mentioned books and a series of lectures that he produced during the s. The history of the philosophical systems that this activity has produced, he argues, is conceived only subjectively and thus inadequately as long as it is regarded as the history of the opinions of individual thinkers.

Because thinking is a species-activity the philosophical systems that have arisen in the course of the history of philosophy should be regarded as necessary standpoints of reason itself. The Idea is not something first produced by philosophical reflection.

Rather, the individual thinker, in the act of thinking, transcends his individuality and functions as an instrument or organ through which the Idea actualizes one of its moments, which is later reproduced in the consciousness of the historian of philosophy. The activity of the Idea is experienced subjectively as inspiration Begeisterung. In producing itself, the Idea does not pass from nonbeing into being, but rather from one state of being being in itself to another being for itself.

The Idea produces itself by determining itself, and human consciousness is the medium of its self-actualization. Reason is nothing but the self-activity of the eternal, infinite idea, whether in art or religion or philosophy, but this activity is always the activity of the Idea in a particular determination and thus also at a particular time , for it is precisely according to the particular determinations of the idea that enter successively into human consciousness that we differentiate the periods and epochs of history.

VGP The emergence of new philosophical systems results on this view from a necessity that is both internal and external. Certain philosophical ideas are only capable of achieving historical expression under specific historical conditions. Just as it was only possible for Christianity to appear at that point in history when the ties of family and nation in Greco-Roman antiquity were dissolved, so it was only possible for modern philosophy to appear under specific historical conditions.

The beginning of the history of modern philosophy must be located at the point at which the modern spirit first begins to distinguish itself from the medieval spirit. The dominant principle of the medieval period was the Judeo-Christian, monotheistic principle, according to which God is conceived as an omnipotent person through an act of whose will the material world was created from nothing ex nihilo.

It is because nature, as conceived from this standpoint, is excluded from the divine substance, according to Feuerbach, that medieval thought showed no interest in the investigation of nature. It is only where the substantiality of nature begins to be rediscovered that the spirit of modernity distinguishes itself from the medieval spirit. This occurs most clearly where matter comes to be regarded as an attribute of the divine substance, so that God is no longer conceived of as a being distinct from nature but rather as the immutable and eternal imminent cause from which the plenitude of finite shapes in nature pours forth.

It is precisely in subjecting nature to experimentation, and thereby to rational comprehension, that spirit raises itself above nature. Breckman and Gooch To be sure, for Leibniz, there is nothing arbitrary about the divine will. Like Tycho Brahe, who sought to combine the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomies, Leibniz sought to reconcile the irreconcilable. Feuerbach criticized Leibniz, however, for not having derived the unity or harmony of the monads from the nature of the monads themselves, and for appealing instead to a theological representation of God as an alien, external power who achieves this harmonization miraculously, and hence, inexplicably.

The book is full of digressions that go on for many pages without making any reference to Bayle, which can produce an impression that it lacks a clearly defined focus. All the more incumbent is it upon us to restore his true stature and to place his teachings and accomplishments as well as his limitations and failures in their true historical context.

Feuerbach started out as a Hegelian. To be sure, he never was a wholly orthodox Hegelian, any more than were Marx and Engels who likewise started out as Hegelians. But Feuerbach was nonetheless an idealist at the outset. His evolution is the conversion of a Hegelian into a materialist. The course of the development of Marx and Engels passes from Hegel through Feuerbach to dialectical materialism.

Rosa Luxemburg somewhere says that dialectical materialism, the world outlook of Marxism, was the child of bourgeois philosophy, a child that cost the mother her life. At this birth Feuerbach may be said to have officiated as the midwife. At the age of twenty and, ironically enough, a young theologian, Feuerbach came to Berlin to study under Hegel. After two years, he studied natural sciences at Erlangen. Philosophy became his lifework.

His first book, published anonymously in , Thoughts on Death and Immortality , shows that years before his definitive break with Hegel, he had already come under the influence of Spinoza, whose doctrine is materialist in its essence, despite its idealist modes of expression, as Feuerbach himself was later brilliantly to demonstrate. By when his monumental book The Essence of Christianity appeared, he was a materialist who waged war against idealism as the last refuge of theology and against Hegelianism as the last rational prop of theology.

Because they represented a decisive break with idealism and a rallying to materialism. As early as the eighteenth century, particularly in France, Marx pointed out in The Holy Family , materialism stood for the struggle not only against all metaphysical systems, against religion and theology, but also against the existing political institutions. To put it differently, materialist ideas were revolutionary. If the credit for driving religion out of its last refuge in history belongs to Marxism, then the credit for launching the final struggle to drive theology out of philosophy belongs to Feuerbach.

In this he was indisputably the first, although he did not thoroughly purge his own thought of idealist remnants. There was nothing cut and dried about Feuerbach. Such claims, Feuerbach explained, are mere translations into philosophic language of the theological doctrine that God created the world. Whoever fails to break with Hegelianism simply refuses to break with theology, concluded Feuerbach. German idealism had forged powerful weapons; Feuerbach turned these weapons against idealism itself.

Anticipating the conquests of natural science, the German philosopher Kant had introduced the doctrine of evolution into philosophy; Hegel was later to extend evolution into history.

But evolution is unthinkable outside of time and space. And so Kant recognized time and space as forms of cognizance, that is, as indispensable premises for human reason. With this Feuerbach agreed, only immediately to add that time and space must be much more than that. Are not time and space the necessary forms of existence, as well as the necessary forms of intuition and knowledge, the indispensable premises for the existence of all creatures and things?

Of course they are. Space and time, said Feuerbach, can be forms of cognizance only because I myself happen to be part of whatever exists, only because I myself am a creature living in time and space.

A timeless sensation, a timeless will, a timeless thought, a timeless essence — are absurd fictions. Whatever is located outside of time, has by this token no temporal existence and cannot strive either to will think.

According to Feuerbach, being could not possibly mean an existence in thought alone. Such a contention is meaningless. It must exist in the outside world. The starting point of idealism is that mind is prior to matter. Feuerbach concentrated his heaviest fire against this. What divides the opposing schools of human thought is precisely their starting points.