Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–1872) was a German philosopher who developed a materialist critique of religion and Hegelian idealism. Feuerbach represents the pinnacle of pre-Marxist materialism and played a crucial role in the development of Marx and Engels' philosophical thought, even as they ultimately moved beyond his limitations.

Feuerbach's philosophy

Materialism against Hegelian idealism: Feuerbach rejected Hegel's objective idealism, which posited that the Absolute Idea (Geist) was the foundation of reality. Instead, Feuerbach insisted that material, natural existence was primary, and that consciousness was derived from material being.

As Feuerbach famously declared, "Man is what he eats" (Der Mensch ist was er isst), emphasizing, literally, the material, bodily basis of human existence against idealist abstractions.

Critique of religion: Feuerbach's most influential work, 'The Essence of Christianity' (1841), argued that religion is a human creation, a projection of humanity's own nature onto an imaginary divine being. God is not the creator of man; rather, man creates God by externalizing and alienating his own human essence.

RELIGION is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself God is not what man is – man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful. God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely negative, comprehending all negations. But in religion man contemplates his own latent nature. Hence it must be shown that this antithesis, this differencing of God and man, with which religion begins, is a differencing of man with his own nature.

For Feuerbach, theology is merely anthropology in disguise. When humans worship God's love, wisdom, or justice, they are actually worshiping idealized human qualities projected outward.

Marx and Engels' engagement with Feuerbach

Feuerbach greatly influenced the Young Hegelians, including Marx and Engels. His materialism provided the philosophical weapon to overthrow Hegelian idealism. As Engels recalled:

Then came Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity^[D]. With one blow, it pulverized the contradiction, in that without circumlocutions it placed materialism on the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence. The spell was broken; the “system” was exploded and cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must himself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all became at once Feuerbachians. How enthusiastically Marx greeted the new conception and how much — in spite of all critical reservations — he was influenced by it, one may read in the The Holy Family^[E].

However, Marx and Engels quickly moved beyond Feuerbach, recognizing the limitations of his materialism.

Limitations of Feuerbach's materialism

While Feuerbach broke with idealism, his materialism remained contemplative rather than practical, and mechanical rather than dialectical.

Contemplative, not practical materialism

Feuerbach understood reality as an object of contemplation and perception, not as the product of human practical activity.

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

Feuerbach's materialism was passive, humans observe and contemplate nature but do not transform it through labor and practice. This meant Feuerbach could not understand that human consciousness and human nature itself are products of historical practice, not eternal givens.

Ahistorical and abstract conception of human nature

Feuerbach posited an eternal, unchanging human essence or "species-being" that exists outside of history and social relations.

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:

• To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual.

• Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.

Because Feuerbach viewed human nature as a fixed essence rather than as historically produced through social relations and labor, he could not understand:

- How different modes of production create different forms of consciousness.

- How class society produces alienation.

- How revolutionary transformation of society transforms human nature itself.

Inability to grasp revolutionary practice

Feuerbach's contemplative materialism left him unable to understand the transformation of the world through revolutionary practice. Marx's eleventh and most famous thesis on Feuerbach emphasizes this:

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

Feuerbach could critique religion intellectually, but he could not understand that religion would only be abolished through the revolutionary transformation of the material conditions that produce religious alienation, i.e., class society and exploitation.

Mechanical, not dialectical

Feuerbach rejected Hegel's dialectics along with his idealism, throwing out the rational kernel with the mystical shell. He failed to develop a materialist dialectics. Without dialectics, Feuerbach could not grasp development, contradiction, and qualitative transformation, the tools necessary for understanding historical change and revolution.

From Feuerbach to historical materialism

Marx and Engels synthesized Feuerbach's materialism with Hegel's dialectics to create dialectical materialism and historical materialism.

From Feuerbach, they took:

• The materialist critique of idealism.
• The understanding that consciousness is derived from material being.
• The critique of religion as human self-alienation.

From Hegel, they took:

• The dialectical method (development through contradiction).
• The historical approach.
• The understanding that consciousness is active, not passive.

What they added:

• Practice as the basis of cognition and the criterion of truth.
• Labor and production as the foundation of human existence and history.
• Class struggle as the motor of historical development.
• Revolutionary transformation as the goal of philosophy.

  The separation from Hegelian philosophy was here also the result of a return to the materialist standpoint. That means it was resolved to comprehend the real world — nature and history — just as it presents itself to everyone who approaches it free from preconceived idealist crotchets. It was decided mercilessly to sacrifice every idealist fancy which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in a fantastic interconnection. And materialism means nothing more than this. But here the materialistic world outlook was taken really seriously for the first time and was carried through consistently — at least in its basic features — in all domains of knowledge concerned. Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, a start was made from his revolutionary side, described above, from the dialectical method. But in its Hegelian form, this method was unusable. According to Hegel, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The absolute concept does not only exist — unknown where — from eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world. It develops into itself through all the preliminary stages which are treated at length in the Logic and which are all included in it. Then it “alienates” itself by changing into nature, where, unconscious of itself, disguised as a natural necessity, it goes through a new development and finally returns as man’s consciousness of himself. This self-consciousness then elaborates itself again in history in the crude form until finally the absolute concept again comes to itself completely in the Hegelian philosophy. According to Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development apparent in nature and history — that is, the causal interconnection of the progressive movement from the lower to the higher, which asserts itself through all zigzag movements and temporary retrogression — is only a copy [Abklatsch] of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with. We again took a materialistic view of the thoughts in our heads, regarding them as images [Abbilder] of real things instead of regarding real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept. Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought — two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the dialectic of Hegel was turned over; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet. And this materialist dialectic, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was, remarkably enough, discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even of Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen. ⁽²⁾ In this way, however, the revolutionary side of Hegelian philosophy was again taken up and at the same time freed from the idealist trimmings which with Hegel had prevented its consistent execution. The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of readymade things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidentally and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end — this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted.

Historical significance

Despite his limitations, Feuerbach played a crucial transitional role: - He demolished Hegelian idealism and restored materialism to philosophy.

- He provided Marx and Engels with the initial materialist framework they would develop into historical materialism.

- His critique of religion as alienation influenced Marx's theory of alienation under capitalism.

- He represents the highest point pre-Marxist materialism could reach before it required dialectics and revolutionary practice to advance further.

Feuerbach thus stands as both the culmination of one philosophical tradition (contemplative materialism) and the necessary stepping stone to another (dialectical and historical materialism). To understand Marx, one must understand both what Marx learned from Feuerbach and what Marx added that Feuerbach could not conceive.