Heaven Wasn't His Destination

The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach

William B. Chamberlain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135979287
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

If forced to state Feuerbach's philosophical genealogy, one would have to say that he was son of Hegel, father of Marx, and half-brother of Comte. In his own day he had many a celebratory and many a vilifier. His philosophy has received very little direct treatment in the English language. Feuerbach's contribution was in his writings on religion and philosophy, each of them a manifesto to humanity, telling us that the desires of men can be satisfied here below.

The object of this book, first published in 1941, is twofold. It is its intention to pay humble tribute to a little understood philosopher whose stature grows with the years, and in so doing perhaps to provide a key to the question of religion and personal immortality for those who reject philosophical idealism and a personal God.

Chapter I

Idealism and Positivism

An uncrowned monarch was ruler of German thought in 1824. In that year there came to the capital a young ex-student of theology, one of the ruler’s subjects. The young subject was not long a subject; he rebelled against the monarch’s Absolute, and he went away. No one expected to hear more of him. Two decades later the monarch was dead; the court was divided and dispersed; and the rebellious ex-subject was acknowledged arch-rebel of the day; “the whole of German philosophy and culture stood within his shadow.”¹ The monarch was Hegel; his rebel subject was Feuerbach.

The fourth of the five sons of the eminent criminal lawyer and jurist, Ritter Anselm von Feuerbach, was born in Landshut in Bavaria July 28, 1804.² His name was Ludwig Andreas. During Ludwig’s boyhood his father’s career led the family from Landshut to Munich; thence to Bamberg, and thence to Ansbach, where Ludwig finished his studies in the Gymnasium in 1822. In the following year he matriculated at Heidelberg, intending to pursue theological studies. But he was uninspired by his teachers, save Professor Daub, and found that his bent was rather for philosophy than theology. He therefore went to Berlin, “led by the call of Hegel”³ and pushed by the hand of Daub. His discipleship there lasted two years. He was a good student, but his discontent and disagreement with much of Hegel’s system, as well as the drive of his inchoate humanism, prevented him from absorbing as much as he might otherwise have absorbed at the fount of Hegelian wisdom.

Feuerbach concluded his academic career at Erlangen, studying philosophy and natural science. It was there that he wrote his unorthodox Gedanken uber Tod und Unster-blichkeit (“Thoughts on Death and Immortality”),^a anonymously published in 1830. The fact of his authorship, however, soon leaked out, and he was branded as a radical. This fact, coupled with Feuerbach’s awkward and embarrassed manner of public delivery, precluded the possibility of a professional career for him, although he did work for a few years as an unsalaried docent at Erlangen. During the 1830s Feuerbach lived precariously, struggling for a hand-to-mouth living, and writing. In 1833 and 1837, respectively, he published his two volumes, Die Geschichte des Neueren Philosophie (“The History of the Newer Philosophy”). And between these, in 1834, he wrote his Abälard und Heloise. In 1837 he married Bertha Low and moved to Bruckberg, where was located the porcelain factory which was to provide him a modest living until 1860. A share in the factory was his wife’s dowry. It was, however, Bertha, rather than the pottery, which attracted Feuerbach; their courtship was idyllic and their married life was happy and contented. Even the beauteous and much-sought Johanna Kapp, who broke a number of famous hearts—including that of the novelist Gottfried Keller—broke not a single Bruckberg plate. Her desperate love for Feuerbach drove her to insanity and death; Feuerbach and his wife lived happily on.

In 1838 Feuerbach published his Pierre Bayle, and in 1839 his Philosophie und Christenthum (“Philosophy and Christianity”), as well as a work on Hegel. These gained him some repute and following among the critical younger philosophers. Then, in 1841, he published his Das Wesen des Christenthums (“The Essence of Christianity”). This was his chief work; with it Feuerbach’s star reached its zenith, and for the ensuing decade he bestrode the philosophical world like a Colossus; even his enemies admitted it. Two years later he wrote his Grundsätzen der Philosophie der Zukunft (“Bases of the Philosophy of the Future”). His influence spread. He came into contact with Strauss, Ruge, Herwegh, Marx, Engels, and others; he carried on a voluminous correspondence with leaders of thought in all domains. Yet all the while he lived a simple, isolated life, his only concession to the world being a penchant for varicoloured waistcoats and flamboyant neckties. (The poet Herwegh said he had the air of a Bavarian lieutenant.)

Although Feuerbach played no direct role in affairs political, his religious rebellion carried over, as we shall see anon, into politics in the doctrines of some of his followers. For this reason he was a minor hero to the revolutionists of 1848. Despite the miserable collapse of their efforts, Feuerbach was able to emerge from his seclusion during the years 1848 and 1849 and was permitted, under the Diet of Frankfort, to give public lectures on religion and the philosophy of the future to a mixed audience of workers and intellectuals in Heidelberg. After a brief emergence Feuerbach returned to Bruckberg and isolation. His star by then had passed its zenith; many of his friends were in exile; others had moved beyond him and were preoccupying themselves with problems in the more general social realm in the light of the then emerging philosophy of Marxism, itself semi-Feuerbachian in origin, but meta-Feuerbachian in structure and conclusions. In 1857 Feuerbach wrote his Theogonie, considered by himself and his friends as his most important work, but considered by history to be less important than his Wesen des Christenthums. In 1860 the Bruckberg porcelain factory failed and Feuerbach had to remove to Nuremberg. There he lived, his modest living inadequately supplied by the voluntary subscriptions of his friends the world over, publishing in 1866 his last work, Gott, Freiheit, und Unsterblichkeit (“God, Freedom, and Immortality”).

From that time on Feuerbach’s health began to fail him; during his last days he was racked with pain; and on September 13, 1872, death—which he had long regarded as a natural, human, and proper end—came to claim him. So passed a simple and modest man. He had, as we shall see, consecrated his entire life to exposing all the dogmas, illusions, and authorities which seek, in the words of Nietzsche, to divinize or diabolize natural and human things.

It has been said that Feuerbach belongs to Hegel as much as the beaker of hemlock belongs to Socrates, that “Feuerbach was Hegel’s fate.”⁴ This is thoroughly true, both politico-historically and philosophically. The Hegelian system prepared the way; Hegel had to have a Feuerbach. Whether, without a Hegel, there still would have been a Feuerbach is another question. It is our contention, however, that there would have been, for the social and cultural milieu which produced Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling also produced the social and cultural contradictions which gave impetus and meaning to the philosophies of Feuerbach, Strauss, Ruge, and Marx.

The neo-Hegelian Croce is un-Hegelian in attempting to divide Hegel. He asserts that there are two Hegels, the historical and the philosophical. He admits, and seems to regret, the Hegel who was a prop and bulwark to conservative Prussian absolutism. And so he says that this Hegel “must not be confused with the philosopher Hegel who alone belongs to the history of Philosophy.”⁵ This type of Hegelianism, in general, looks down its nose at those—i.e. the Young Hegelians—who, we submit, took what was living, threw out what was dead, in the philosophy of Hegel. But it was exactly the fact that Hegel, like peace, is indivisible which made inevitable Young, or left, Hegelianism. To be sure, Hegelianism is subject to interpretations which lead to diametrically opposite positions. Hegel’s Logos led to directly theistic interpretations, on the right; his historical dialectic led to interpretations regarded as directly atheistic. But in neither direction can we make out a major dualism in the Hegelian system. The whole trend of Hegelianism leads to an identification, not a division, of philosophy and history.^b

It is in no sense our purpose here to go into an exhaustive discussion of Hegel, to whom we shall have occasion to refer several times throughout the course of this writing. It is necessary, nevertheless, to devote a few sentences to him by way of preliminary.

Hegel cannot be condensed into a book, much less a sentence. An English Hegelian has, however, packed a good deal into the following few words: “As Aristotle—with considerable assistance from Plato—made explicit the abstract universal, that was implicit in Socrates, so Hegel—with less considerable assistance from Fichte and Schelling —made explicit the concrete universal, that was implicit in Kant.”⁶ The concrete universal and the dialectic of opposites were Hegel’s contribution to philosophy, which latter he defined as the “thinking view of things.”⁷ He sought to transcend all the dualisms that have plagued the history of philosophy—between mind and matter, form and content, conscience and law, individual and society—by presenting them all as equally objective aspects of a continuing process. The origin and point of repair of all things is the Absolute Idea, derived from the first, simple, initial concept of Being. By means of the dialectic, the Absolute—mind, form, conscience, self—is self-alienated into matter, content, law, society. The system is pan-logistic. The dialectic pervades all thought and existence. It is characterized by the triadic law of the thesis, preliminary affirmation and unification; the antithesis, negation and differentiation; and the synthesis, final and higher unification. The subject matter, systematically speaking, of the thesis is logic and the phenomenology of spirit, of the antithesis, nature, law, and history; and of the synthesis, art, religion, and philosophy. The creation in this system is immanent. The deus is in, not ex, machina. Theoretically, the only a priori in the system is the initial Being, from which Hegel pretends to induce the Absolute Idea. There is no transcendence in the system, no externally derived postulates of the reason. There are no limitations, as with Kant, to the activity of the mind.^c “The real is the rational; the rational, real,” according to the famous Hegelian dictum. Nothing is inscrutable; the Absolute is self-revealing. From the indiscriminate empirical facts of the world we can immediately draw appropriate metaphysical axioms. Man, the self-alienation of the Idea, is significant only in so far as he is the self-alienation of the Idea; he becomes swallowed up in the Higher Synthesis. Religion is the presentation of this system in a sentimental form; God is the system. And philosophy is the more explicit, intellectual appraisal of the whole, by implication one step higher than religion; thus Hegel—whom his critics accuse of sucking the world from his finger tips by a process of logical deduction—can be construed as occupying a place in the cosmic and universal scheme one step higher than God.^d

The preceding paragraph, save, perhaps, for the last sentence, states the position more or less as might many an Hegelian. From it three things stand out: The sweeping direct relation between the progress of the Idea and that of the world, by means of the dialectic; the deification of practically everything that exists, from Hegel’s pencil (a self-alienation of the Idea) to the Prussian state under Frederick William III—by the “All that is real is rational” formula; and the lowly, subordinate, insufficient role played by man. History makes man, rather than man making history, with Hegel; there is no “monadology”^e in the system.

It was quite natural that the continuators of Hegel should travel in two directions. Those to whom the theological aspect, the literal translation, of Hegelianism appeared paramount; to whom the practical political, as well as theoretical, absolutism of the system was agreeable; who conceived the Logos of the system as all-important—those made up the Hegelian right.^f On the other hand, there were those to whom the idea of progress, the ideological processus, of the system was paramount. These tended to deny the theological value of logical forms, the development of which they ascribed to the human thinker rather than the self-revealing Absolute. This led to the conception that the Absolute was man-made, and, since a mere logical series cannot be construed as the author of nature, the consequent starting-point was the material universe. Those who developed Hegelianism in this sense were the Hegelian left, or Young Hegelians. The system with them ceased to be an idealization of religion, and became instead a natural theory, prominently operated and explained by the Hegelian logic.

The foregoing sketches, in a most summary way—purposely stressing differences rather than similarities—the background upon and against which the pre-eminent left continuator of Hegel, Feuerbach, built his philosophy. In 1839 he wrote his Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie (“Towards a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy”). Although this belongs to the middle period of Feuerbach’s work, we may be permitted briefly to comment upon it in order to fill out a part of the just-sketched cartoon.

At the outset, Feuerbach places the situation in focus by using Hegel against Hegel. It had been the contention of the latter that, since truth is seen only through the working out of the dialectic, no philosophy had the right to lay claim to abso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter I. Idealism and Positivism
• Chapter II. The Essence of Christianity
• Chapter III. Immortality
• Chapter IV. Feuerbach and German Literature
• Chapter V. Philosophy of the Future
• Chapter VI. Feuerbach and Marx
• L’Envoi
• Bibliography
• Index