Feuerbach is best known for his book The Essence of Christianity which burst like a bombshell on the German intellectual scene in the early Forties and was soon translated into English by the English novelist, George Eliot. It quickly became like a Bible to an entire generation of intellectuals who thought of themselves as reformers and revolutionaries, including Arnold Ruge, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and David F. Strauss, who wrote that the book was the "truth for our times."

Superficially, the central thesis is deceptively simple: the self comes to consciousness over against another self and in the process of self-differentiation realizes that it is a member of a species. The imagination under the pressure of wish, feeling, and the imagination seizes on the idea of the species and converts it into an individual being.

Man — this is the mystery of religion — objectifies his being and then again makes himself an object to the objectivized image of himself thus converted into a subject … . (GW 5:71; EC 29f).

But this simplicity vanishes as soon as the reader turns to the first chapter. There one is confronted with argumentation and terminology that are obscure and speculative by contemporary standards. It is argued that (a) religion is identical with self-consciousness, (b) that consciousness is in the strict sense identical with the "infinite nature of consciousness," and (c) that a limited consciousness is no consciousness. These sweeping assertions are then interwoven with such claims as "man is nothing without an object" or that "the object to which a subject necessarily relates is nothing else than the subjects own objective nature" (GW V:28-32; EC. 1-4). The reader, hoping to understand the ramifications of the simpler thesis, is suddenly wrestling with obscure arguments that seem to be the tip of a greater conceptual iceberg.

The analogy of an iceberg is apt because as Marx Wartofsky has shown, the allusive nature of the book is best accounted for if one understands that it is only intelligible against its Hegelian background; more particularly, The Phenomenology of Spirit. Not only does it recapitulate the theory of self-differentiation in that work but the central ideas of objectification, alienation, and reconciliation are drawn from it. Indeed, what made Feuerbach's book appear to be "the truth for our times" was that it enabled an entire generation of young intellectuals to appropriate the most important elements of Hegel's philosophy of Spirit without accepting his metaphysics and his endorsement of Christianity. Feuerbach, it is said, simply stood Hegel's philosophy of Spirit on its head. Just as Absolute Spirit achieved self-knowledge by objectifying itself in the finite world, so the finite spirit comes to self-knowledge by externalizing itself in the idea of God and then realizing that this externalization is only the form in which the human spirit discovers its own essential nature.

So considered, the argument is an example of Feuerbach's "transformative method," which he first stated in his Vorläufige Thesen and which Karl Marx thought was Feuerbach's contribution to philosophy. The method states that Hegel's philosophy is based on the reification of abstract predicates like "thought" which are then treated as agents. Since this is the clue to understanding Hegel, it follows that what is valid in Hegel can be appropriated by inverting the subject and predicate and restoring them to their proper relationship. For example, instead of construing the predicate "thinking" as an agent, one transforms the equation and asserts that thinking is the activity of existing individuals. Thought comes out of being, not being out of thought.

Although the central argument is undoubtedly influenced by Hegel, there are other important elements intertwined with it that make it misleading to say that the book is simply an inversion of the Hegelian paradigm. One of the most important of these elements is Feuerbach's interpretation of the role of feeling. Unlike Hegel who regarded religion as basically the apprehension of ideas in symbolic form, Feuerbach believed, with Schleiermacher, that religion was principally a matter of feeling which then manifests itself in longing. Moreover, he regarded feeling as "unrestricted subjectivity;" that is, as unfettered by reason or nature. It assumes the deepest wishes of the heart to be true.

Longing is the necessity of feeling, and feeling longs for a personal God. But this longing after the personality of God is true, earnest, and profound only when it is the longing for one personality… Longing says: There must be a personal God, i.e., it cannot be that there is not; satisfied feeling says he is. (GW V:257f; EC 146)

It is in the chapters dealing with feeling that strike the modern reader as most contemporary because what we find there is a picture of the human self in the grip of the rage to live and longing for a reality that can grant its deepest wishes. In feeling "the whole world, with all its pomp and glory, is nothing weighed against human feeling" (GW V:220; EC 121). This "omnipotence of feeling" breaks through all the limits of understanding and manifests itself in several religious beliefs, all of which Feuerbach explored: the faith in providence, which is a form of confidence in the infinite value of one's own existence; faith in miracle, the confidence that the gods are unfettered by natural necessity and can realize one's wishes in an instant; and faith in immortality, the certainty that the gods will not permit the individual to perish.

Feeling, however, is not the only faculty involved in the religious objectification. The second is imagination (Phantasie) which Feuerbach argued is the original organ of religion. It is original for three reasons. First of all, the imagination, unlike abstract thought, produces images that have the power to stir the feelings and emotions. Human beings are sensuous creatures who require sensuous images as vehicles for their hopes and dreams. Second, the imagination corresponds to personal feelings because it can set aside limits and all laws painful to the feelings. It can make objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfactions of his subjective wishes. Third, the imagination, unlike feeling, can deal with abstractions taken from the real world. In this sense it is a mode of representation, but, unlike thought, drapes its abstractions in sensuous imagery.

The imagination, however, is deceptive in the nature of the case, especially when it becomes allied with feeling and wish. It can cheat the reason. It can screen contradictions and set aside limits. It can exercise its deceptive power by confusing the abstract with the concrete, which is precisely what has happened in the Christian religion. The imagination has taken the species characteristics of human consciousness — thought, will, and feeling — and unified them in a single, perfect divine being.

God is the idea of the species as an individual…freed from all limits which exist in the consciousness and feeling of the individual … . (GW V:268f; EC 153)

The strategy of Feuerbach's book is to convince his readers that this explanation best accounts for the form and content of Christian doctrines and practices as well as the contradictions in them. In Part I, which he regards as positive, he attempts to show how each Christian doctrine — creation, Incarnation, Logos, Trinity, immortality — is best understood either as an objectification of some distinctively human predicate or as an imaginative expression of wish and feeling. The doctrine of God and of the Trinity are examples of the former and the practice of prayer and the belief in providence and immortality are examples of the latter. In Part II, "The False or Theological Essence of Religion," he attempts to show what is harmful in Christianity when it transforms its naïve expressions into theology.

One of the most sensational chapters in the book has to do with Feuerbach's interpretation of the doctrine of the Incarnation. He had argued that Christians assign to the deity those predicates which are the perfections of the human species and which are absolute for it. A predicate is not divine because God possesses it; rather, God possesses it because it is in itself thought to be divine. Without these predicates, God would be a defective being. Consequently, when Christians affirm that God is love, it is the predicate that is decisive. The Christian could not permit the possibility of a subject behind the predicate, so to speak, who could or could not love. But if love is the defining predicate, and if the Christian is affirming that God renounced his Godhead for the sake of humanity, then Feuerbach argued that this is an unconscious confession that love is more important than God.

Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As god has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God — the evil being — of religious fanaticism. (GW V:109; EC 53)

Just as Hegel held that the Absolute alienates itself when it objectifies itself in creation, Feuerbach argued that the human alienates itself when it objectifies its nature in the Divine. He argued, first, that the very act of attributing human predicates to an external divine being necessarily withdraws these same predicates from the human species to which they properly belong by denying to itself what it attributes to God. Secondly, he argues that when individual feeling is the focus of religion there is a loss of species consciousness and, consequently, a loss of unity with nature and other human beings. It involves a discrepancy between a given individual and his/her essential nature. The only valid object of human veneration should be the species/being.

This argument will probably be convincing only to those who embrace the Hegelian notion of Spirit. But in the second part of his book, Feuerbach leveled a number of criticisms at Christianity that do not depend on this paradigm. Here the crucial term is not "alienation" but "contradictions" and the latter arise when the naïve and involuntary projection of religion is made into an intentional object of theology. Among these contradictions are those doctrines that exhibit the paradoxes of the religious illusion, logical contradictions which arise out of mutually incompatible predicates attributed to the deity, and, finally, incompatible virtues that are inherent in religious faith. For example, Feuerbach argues that one of the contradictions in Christianity is that it teaches that the truth will make human beings free but it also corrupts the "sentiment of truth" by claiming that God revealed himself only at a particular time and place and enables some to believe and not others. This necessarily leads to superstition and sophistry.

Two of these contradictions are especially important. The first is that the theological notion of God contains two incompatible types of predicates: metaphysical and personal. On the one hand, the divine being is said to be omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and impassible; on the other hand, this God is a loving, compassionate being moved by human suffering. Contemporary critics of theism have often remarked on this, especially process philosophers, but Feuerbach tried to explain why the contradiction is inherent in theistic religions. He argues that the metaphysical predicates spring out of the objectification of the human attribute of reason while the personal predicates arise out of the projection of love. The second contradiction is not so much intellectual as psychological. It is the "inward disunion" that arises out of the difference between faith and love. Faith, Feuerbach argued, depends on a determinate intellectual judgment as to what is true and false. The concept of heresy is inherent in a religion when faith is made the primary virtue. It follows that those who do not accept the Christian revelation are not merely in error but damned. Faith is essentially partisan. This is why Christians have a special obligation to evangelize non-believers and to reject those among themselves who do not adhere to correct belief, to dogma. But so construed, faith stands opposed to love because love is by its very nature universal and inclusive. This contradiction accounts for why Christian theologians themselves have from the beginning attempted to soften or marginalize the concept of Hell.

Feuerbach was willing to acknowledge that Christian faith does give "a person a peculiar sense of his own dignity and importance" (GW V:413; EC 249). In this sense he might have agreed with Kierkegaard who later argued that the notion of an individual recognized by the Creator of the Universe stretches individual consciousness to its extreme limits. But he also argued that this same belief is not only narcissistic but contributes to the arrogance and fanaticism of Christianity. Furthermore, this dignity is conveyed circuitously, so speak. Believers do not possess dignity in themselves but only acquire it mediated through a deity just as a servant sometimes identifies himself with the social class of the employer.

Feuerbach's book received criticism from two quarters: expectedly from Christian theologians but surprisingly, from the atheists Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer. A well-known Protestant theologian argued that Feuerbach's thesis might apply to Catholicism but not to Protestantism, and Stirner complained that despite Feuerbach's criticism of Idealism, he had merely substituted another abstraction, the human essence, as the basis of morality and veneration. Both criticisms forced Feuerbach to shift his position although the latter criticism shook Feuerbach most deeply. He took care of the Protestant criticism by writing a small book on Luther that enabled him to emphasize even more than he had that the certitude of Christian faith is grounded in a sensuous anthropomorphism in which human welfare is the aim of the Divine. For Luther, everything depends on the conviction that God became man "for us". To believe in Christ, he argued, is to believe that God has presented mankind with a visible exact image of himself. And as against Stirner, Feuerbach moved towards nominalism and conceded that in his book he had been "still haunted by the abstract Rational Being…as distinct from the actual sensuous being of nature and humanity" (GW X: 188). From this point on, his writings emphasized human sensuousness, the concreteness of experience, and the rejection of any dualism of spirit and matter.

Perhaps smarting from these criticisms, Feuerbach once more revised his explanation of religion in 1845 with a small book entitled Das Wesen der Religion which then became the basis for his Heidelberg Lectures on the Essence of Religion in 1848. Although he sought to convey the impression that his revisions were only minor, a careful reading reveals that he no longer appeals to the Hegelian paradigm of Spirit coming to itself but argues that the origin and ground of religions is the encounter with nature. The human self is an embodied sensuous being immersed in a field of natural beings that impinge on it and upon which it is dependent. Because the human being does not first relate to nature through abstract thought but is concerned with those qualities of nature that strike it emotionally, it does not perceive an objective nature determined by laws but the physiognomic character of things. Things in nature appear to it as beautiful or disturbing or comfortable or threatening. Indeed, it takes considerable social conditioning and education for these perceived quality of nature to be treated as merely subjective. The imagination or Phantasie of archaic humanity fastens on these immediate qualities and under the pressure of desire and wish transforms the beings of nature into ensouled beings, beings that have intentions. Thrown into a world in which it does not feel at home, the human self wishes to change the uncanny being of nature into a known and comfortable nature. Monotheism arises when civilizations sufficiently evolve to regard nature as a whole.

The tendency to personify nature is reinforced by the fact that the imagination is in the service of egoism and the drive-to-happiness (Glückseligkeitstrieb). Impelled by the love of life, the humans self instinctively transforms its desires into a being capable of granting them, into a subjective, feeling being. Religious faith is basically the confidence that the gods are concerned with the well-being of human beings in general and the individual in particular. But the imagination does not create out of nothing. It requires raw materials, whether these be the impressionable events and being in nature, sense impressions, or even abstractions that the mind has drawn from sensuous experience.

The differences among religions are due in part to the difference in the raw materials upon which the imagination works. In archaic times, the imagination took flight from natural objects and things — earth, fire, animals, and astronomical bodies. But the imagination can also be fueled by historical personages, such as the Buddha or Jesus, or, indeed, by abstractions themselves, such as "the whole" or "Being as such". For example, Feuerbach explained the difference between polytheism and monotheism as a result of the imagination being fascinated by the multiplicity of beings, in the former case, and by the coherence and unity of the world, in the latter case.

There are even different ways in which a given abstraction, such as the coherence of nature, can provide fuel for the imagination. One can distinguish two types of monotheism, the metaphysical, which is characteristic of Christianity, and the practical-poetic, which is characteristic of the Hebrew Bible and the Koran. In the latter, the activity of God is indistinguishable from the activity of nature so that it is indifferent whether one says that God or nature provides food, makes the rain to fall, or endows creatures with sight. Because nature is omnipresent, God is omnipresent; because nature is all-powerful, God is all-powerful. The Christian imagination, however, closes its eyes to nature, separates the personified essence of nature entirely from sense perception and transforms what was originally nature into an abstract unified metaphysical being. Consequently, while there is something lively and animated about Yahweh and Allah, the god of the Christians is a "withered, dried-out God in whom all traces of His origin in nature is effaced" (GW VI: 362; LER 321).

Whereas Feuerbach had sought in The Essence of Christianity to show how every Christian doctrine could be explained as a projection of the species concept or as a wishful illusion, the burden of his Lectures is to reveal the intellectual errors arising from the misinterpretations of nature and, especially, the misinterpretation of monotheism; that is, when Christians unify the whole of nature under the abstraction "Being". Consequently, many of the lectures are discussions of the so-called "proofs" for the existence of God and they plod unimaginatively over ground that has been packed down by philosophers such as David Hume. But there are some interesting lectures based on the assumption that the secret of metaphysics and theology is the transformation of names and universals into causes. And there is also an interesting lecture on how the dualism of soul and body arises where he argued, among other things, that our sense of two distinct ontological realms arises because we utilize two distinct linguistic categories for thinking about each sphere. But it does not follow that because we use one sort of language to talk about the body and another about the mind that they are separable. The distinction has to do with the perspectives we are compelled to adopt, and not with reality itself.

Just as the explanation of religion is different in the Lectures from what it is in the Essence of Christianity, so, too, are the criticisms. In the earlier work, Christianity was a form of alienation from the human essence. In the latter, Christianity is a disorder of the desires and, hence, a grotesque form of self-understanding. The Christian's desires, unlike the pagan's, "exceed the nature of man, the limits of this life, of this real sensuous world" (GW VI: 259; LER 231). Christians do not accept and affirm themselves as parts of nature. And this reveals itself in two forms: (a) the wish not to be bound by the causal nexus, as seen in the importance given to miracles, and (b) the desire for immortality, a personal existence free from necessity. For a Christian, the "only guarantee that his supernatural desires will be fulfilled lies in his conviction that nature itself is dependent on a supernatural being and owes its existence solely to the arbitrary exercise of this being's will" (GW VI: 262; LER 234). Christianity is a form of diseased Eros resulting in fantastic and unearthly wishes that involve a rejection of embodied, sensuous existence.

It could be argued, as Van Harvey has, that the explanation and interpretation of religion in these later works is a more adequate and less speculative than proposed in the Christianity, with one exception. In the earlier view, Feuerbach attributed the psychological hold of Christianity on humans to lie in its assurance of personal recognition by the Divine and the hope of immortality. Consequently, Feuerbach concedes that religion serves an existential function that no other human practice has yet filled; and he argued that it can only be banished if human beings were to give up their narcissistic hope for recognition and their desire to live forever. But if, as he seems to argue in these later works, religion is simply a misinterpretation of how to use nature, then it will diminish as our understanding of nature increases. Religion, in short, is a prescientific mode of thought. Anthropology and psychology, I think, tend to support the earlier view.

Feuerbach returned once again to the interpretation of religion in 1857 and published Theogonie nach den quellen des hebräischen und christlichen Altertums. A second, unchanged version appeared in 1866 under a slightly altered title. Here Feuerbach concentrated upon the subjective grounds of religion. The argument is that the gods do not spring out of the human feeling of dependence or the encounter with nature but are, rather, the reified wishes of humankind. As a conscious being bent on its own fulfillment, the person has purposes, needs, and desires, the shadowside of which is the awareness that these may be frustrated. Hence, all wishes are accompanied by anxiety and fear, a pervading sense of the nothingness that clings to all human activity. With the wish that this nothingness be removed, the conception of the gods arises. When one sees the many intermediate links in the chain between the wish and the realization of that wish the imagination seizes upon the notion of a being that is not subject to limitation and failure, a being that can do what it wishes to do. The gods represent the unity of willing (Wollen) and being able to succeed (Können). A god is simply a being in which this distinction has been annulled. "Where there are no wishes there are no gods". One might call the book a phenomenology of the wish because the discussion ranges imaginatively over the relationship between the fundamental wish for happiness and such cultural phenomena as systems of morality, law, conscience, the taking of oaths, dreams, miracles, pain, the desire for immortality, and, of course, religion. The arguments are copiously illustrated from classical Greek, Hebraic, and early Christian sources. Indeed, one of the defects of the book is that the arguments tend to deteriorate into a mass of learned historical and philological discussion, a defect the Bolin and Jodl edition of Feuerbach's works in 1907 tried to remedy by the dubious device of eliminating the illustrative materials.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
http://www.kreudenstein-online.de/Querdenker/Feuerbach/Wesen_des_Christentums/wesen_der_religion_allg.htm