The Fiery Brook

Selected Writings

Ludwig Feuerbach, Zawar Hanfi

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781680216
• eBook ISBN: 9781781689882
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

Ludwig Feuerbach's departure from the traditional philosophy of Hegel opened a door for generations of radical philosophical thinkers, foremost among them the young Karl Marx. Indeed, much of early Marx is unintelligible without reference to certain fundamental Feuerbachian texts. The selections in this volume, few of them available in translation elsewhere, reveal Feuerbach's fundamental criticisms of the 'old philosophy' of Hegel and advance his own humanistic thought, grounded in life and sensuality. The reader can readily grasp the liberating influence of this unjustly neglected philosopher.

Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

PREFACE

These Principles are the continuation and further substantiation of my Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, which was banned by the unbounded despotism of German censorship. As intended in the first draft, these Principles were to take the form of an elaborate book; but, while preparing the final version, I was for some mysterious reason myself seized by the spirit of German censorship and inflicted upon the manuscript a barbaric curtailment. What escaped this indiscreet censorship saw itself reduced to the following few sheets of paper.

I called them Principles of the Philosophy of the Future because the present—a time of tricky illusions and hoggish prejudices—is incapable of understanding, let alone appreciating, the simple truths from which these Principles are derived: Their very simplicity makes them incomprehensible to the present age.

The Philosophy of the Future addresses itself to the task of leading philosophy from the realm of “detached souls” back into the realm of embodied, living souls; of compelling philosophy to come down from its divine and self-sufficient blissfulness in thought and open its eyes to human misery. To this end, it needs nothing more than human understanding and human speech. But to think, speak, and act in a genuinely human way is to be the privilege only of future generations. At present, the task is not to invent a theory of man, but to pull man out of the mire in which he is bogged down. These Principles are the fruit of engaging in such clean, yet sour work. Their task was to derive the necessity of a philosophy of man, that is, anthropology, from the Philosophy of the Absolute, that is, theology, in order thus to establish a critique of human philosophy through a critique of divine philosophy. A close familiarity with modern philosophy must therefore be presupposed as a condition for their appreciation.

The consequences of these Principles cannot remain unnoticed.

Bruckberg

July 9, 1843

Principles of the Philosophy of the Future

1

The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God—the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.

2

The religious or practical form of this humanization was Protestantism. The God who is man, that is to say the human God, Christ, this and only this is the God of Protestantism. Unlike Catholicism, Protestantism is no longer concerned with what God is in himself, but only with what he is for man; hence, it knows no speculative or contemplative tendency like Catholicism. It has ceased to be theology—it is essentially Christology; that is, religious anthropology.

3

However, Protestantism negated God-in-himself or God as God—for only God-in-himself is, strictly speaking, God—only in practice; theoretically, it left him intact. He exists; however, not for man; that is, the religious man. He is a transcendent being or a being that will one day become an object for man up there in heaven. But that which is other-worldly to religion, is this-worldly to philosophy; what does not constitute an object for the former, does so precisely for the latter.

4

The rational or theoretical assimilation and dissolution of the God who is other-worldly to religion, and hence not given to it as an object, is the speculative philosophy.

5

The essence of speculative philosophy is nothing other than the rationalized, realized, actualized essence of God. The speculative philosophy is the true, consistent, rational theology.

6

Taken as an intelligible (geistig) or an abstract being, that is, regarded neither as human nor as sensuous, but rather as one that is an object for and accessible only to reason or intelligence, God qua God is nothing but the essence of reason itself. But, basing themselves rather on imagination, ordinary theology and Theism regard him as an independent being existing separately from reason. Under these circumstances, it is an inner, a sacred necessity that the essence of reason as distinguished from reason itself be at last identified with it and the divine being thus be apprehended, realized, as the essence of reason. It is on this necessity that the great historical significance of speculative philosophy rests. The proof of the proposition that the divine essence is the essence of reason or intelligence lies in the fact that the determinations or qualities of God, in so far as they are rational or intelligible and not determinations of sensuousness or imagination, are, in fact, qualities of reason.

“God is the infinite being or the being without any limitations whatsoever.” But what cannot be a limit or boundary on God can also not be a limit or boundary on reason. If, for example, God is elevated above all limitations of sensuousness, so, too, is reason. He who cannot conceive of any entity except as sensuous, that is, he whose reason is limited by sensuousness, can only have a God who is limited by sensuousness. Reason, which conceives God as an infinite being, conceives, in point of fact, its own infinity in God. What is divine to reason is also truly rational to it, or in other words, it is a being that perfectly corresponds to and satisfies it. That, however, in which a being finds satisfaction, is nothing but the being in which it encounters itself as its own object. He who finds satisfaction in a philosopher is himself of a philosophical nature. That he is of this nature is precisely what he and others encounter in this satisfaction. Reason “does not, however, pause at the finite, sensuous things; it finds satisfaction in the infinite being alone”—that is to say, the essence of reason is disclosed to us primarily in the infinite being.

“God is the necessary being.” But his necessity rests on the ground that he is a rational, intelligent being. The ground for what the world or matter is does not lie in the world or matter itself, for it is completely indifferent to whether it is or is not, or to why it is so and not otherwise.^* Hence, it must necessarily presuppose another being as its cause, a being that is intelligent and self-conscious and acts according to reasons and goals. For if this being were to be conceived of as lacking intelligence, the question as to its own ground must arise again. The necessity of the primary and the highest being rests, therefore, on the presupposition that the intellect alone is the being that is primary, highest, necessary, and true. Just as the truth and reality of metaphysical or ontotheological determinations depend on their reducibility to psychological or rather anthropological determinations, so the necessity of the divine being in the old metaphysics or ontotheology has meaning, truth, and reality only in the psychological or anthropological characterization of God as an intelligent being. The necessary being is one that it is necessary to think of, that must be affirmed absolutely and which it is simply impossible to deny or annul, but only to the extent to which it is a thinking being itself. Thus, it is its own necessity and reality which reason demonstrates in the necessary being.

“God is unconditional, general—‘God is not this or that particular thing’—immutable, eternal, or timeless being.” But absoluteness, immutability, eternality, and generality are, according to the judgment of metaphysical theology itself, also qualities of the truths or laws of reason, and hence the qualities of reason itself; for what else are these immutable, general, absolute, and universally valid truths of reason if not expressions of the essence of reason itself?

“God is the independent, autonomous being not requiring any other being in order to exist, hence subsisting entirely by and through itself.” But even this abstract, metaphysical characterization has meaning and reality only as a definition of the essence of intelligence and, as such, it states only that God is a thinking and intelligent being or, vice versa, that the thinking being is the divine being; for only a sensuous being will need some other being outside itself in order to exist. I need air to breathe, water to drink, light to be able to see, plants and animals to eat, but nothing—not directly at any rate—in order to think. I cannot conceive of a breathing being without air, nor of a seeing being without light, but I can conceive of a thinking being as existing in complete isolation. A breathing being is necessarily referred to a being outside itself, that is to say, it has the essential object, through which it is what it is, outside itself; but the thinking being is referred only to itself, is its own object, carries its essence within itself and is what it is only through itself.

7

That which is object in theism is subject in speculative philosophy. That which is only the conceived and imagined essence of reason in theism, is the thinking essence of reason itself in speculative philosophy.

The theist represents to himself God as a personal being existing outside reason and man; as a subject, he thinks God as an object. He conceives God as a being, i.e., as an intelligible, non-sensuous being with regard to his idea of it, but as a sensuous being with respect to its actual existence or its truth; for the essential characteristic of an objective existence; i.e., of an existence outside thought or perception, is sensuousness. He distinguishes God from himself in the same sense in which he distinguishes the sensuous objects and beings from himself as existing outside himself; in short, he thinks God from the standpoint of sensuousness. In contrast to this, the speculative theologian or philosopher thinks of God from the standpoint of thought; that is why the distracting idea of a sensuous being does not interpose itself between him and God; and, thus unhindered, he identifies the objective, conceived being with the subjective, thinking being.

The inner necessity by which God is turned from an object of man into his subject, into his thinking ego, can be demonstrated more specifically in the following way: God is an object of man and of man alone and not of the animal. However, what a being is can be known only through its object; the object to which a being is necessarily related is nothing but its own manifest being. Thus, the object of the herbivorous animals i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
• Introduction to the Essence of Christianity
• On “The Beginning of Philosophy”
• The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy
• Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy
• Principles of the Philosophy of the Future
• Preface to the Second Edition of the Essence of Christianity
• Fragments Concerning the Characteristics of My Philosophical Development
• Index