Feuerbach, Ludwig Jean-Philippe Deranty Macquarie University, Australia Introduction Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) is one of the most influential thinkers in the Western tradition of the philosophy of religion. His interest in religion remained even after his theoretical outlook changed radically, first following his encounter with the philosophy and the teaching of Hegel (see hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich) in his early twenties, and then again after he moved away from Hegel’s idealism a decade later, in the late 1830s. Despite these shifts, which turned him from a pious Lutheran into one of the most virulent critics of religion, particularly of modern christianity, Feuerbach remained convinced that religion is the most fundamental expression of human hopes and anxieties and should therefore be the main focus of philosophical inquiries, even for materialist and atheist philosophers. He spent his life gathering material on all religious phenomena, not just in the Christian tradition, but also past religions, as well as contemporary non-Western traditions. Aside from his famous theory of projection, Feuerbach’s name still deserves acknowledgment, as the richness of this comparative and historical work gives him a rightful place amongst the nineteenth-century predecessors of modern-day anthropology. Feuerbach’s first foray into the critique of religion was his Thoughts on Death and Immortality, which he published anonymously in 1830 (Feuerbach [1830] 1980). This book cost him his post and dashed any hope he had of an academic career. His next publication was the book that made him famous, in his own time and for posterity. The Essence of Christianity (henceforth EC) was republished three times in his life time (1841, 1844 and 1848; Feuerbach [1841] 1989) and was translated by the great English novelist George Eliot in 1854. He went on to publish complementary studies, The Essence of Religion, in 1844 (ER; Feuerbach [1846] 2004), and The Essence of Faith According to Luther in 1844 (Luther; Feuerbach [1844] 1990). In 1848, as one of the leading lights of the student and the republican movements involved in the German revolution, he was invited to give a series of lectures in Heidelberg, published as Lectures on the Essence of Religion (Lectures; Feuerbach [1848] 1984). His most complete comparative and historical work came out in 1857, under the title Theogonie (Feuerbach [1857] 1985). Feuerbach is one of the most famous theorists to have propounded a projection theory of religious belief. This theory is far from one-dimensional. Indeed, it seems to change over time, emphases vary, from one writing to the next, even in a single text. Overall, the theory entails a number of explanatory layers. Most of the exegetical work dedicated to Feuerbach is organized as a response to this state of affairs. The highly competent accounts given of his work (notably those by Gooch, Harvey, and The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Editors-in-Chief). © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781119009924.eopr0143 2 FE U E R BACH , LUDWIG Wartofsky) aim to analyze the shifts and even the contradictions between different stages of his thinking. Feuerbach’s work on religion however remains highly consistent throughout his writings. There are many thematic overlaps from the beginning to the end of his career. His work therefore can also be approached in synchronic fashion, as a whole body of thought, on the assumption that his different writings are different paths that he took to explore a number of fundamental intuitions about the significance and the meaning of religion. The logic of religious belief Feuerbach’s thinking is deeply indebted to Hegel’s speculative logic (see hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich), even after he moved away from his absolute idealism. First, he attempts to complete an inversion of Hegel’s grand metaphysical vision. In a traditional understanding of the latter, the Absolute “alienates” itself in the finite natural and human worlds. Through gradual processes taking place in those finite worlds, the Absolute recognizes itself and returns to itself, as it were, notably thanks to the knowledge it can acquire of itself via the increasingly reflective practices of art, religion, and philosophy. Feuerbach inverts that scheme: that which alienates itself by objectifying itself is not the infinite. Rather it is the finite human self, which objectifies itself and its own powers into an absolute being, thus alienating itself into an object that is only itself expressed in a mystified form. The first problem with religious belief is therefore cognitive for Feuerbach: humans don’t recognize their own selves in fictional figures that are creations of their own imaginations. On top of the imaginary inventions that form the content of religions, different cultures often develop rationalizing discourses, theological constructs backed up by philosophical principles, whose function is to provide rational consistency to the mystified content of religious practices and beliefs. In relation to these two forms of religious expression, Feuerbach upholds the classical enlightenment critique of religion as a kind of obfuscation that needs to be dispelled, first for the simple goal of “enlightenment,” that is, to ensure the progression of human culture, but also because ignorance and superstition play so easily into the hands of social and political oppression. The objectification-alienation scheme also provides another reason why the study of religion is so important. That which human beings project into external gods is not just any content. Rather, it is what matters most to them, their deepest desires and anxieties; indeed, it is themselves, in their essential traits. Feuerbach articulates this idea by drawing on another logical trope inspired by Hegel. This is the idea that a subject should not be defined as an autarkic substance which would relate to external objects in ways that do not alter its essence. Rather, the subject is nothing else than the totality of the relationships it has with the entities without which it cannot be what it is: “the object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject’s own but objective nature” (EC 4). FE U E R BACH , LUDWIG 3 The force that religion exerts over individuals and societies across human history shows that religious objects are somehow “essential” for human subjects. According to the rules just mentioned, this means that what human beings project in theogonies and mythical stories is in fact an externalized expression of their own selves captured in their essence. In religion, we can observe the essence of humanity, its most intimate reality projected large into big narratives and theological creations. A key hermeneutic rule derives from the identity of subject and object (see hermeneutics and interpretation). If the religious mistake consists in projecting into objects what essentially belongs to the subject, the most direct way of correcting this error is simply to restore the correct order by inverting the inversion. This is the basis for Feuerbach’s method, which consists in taking seriously the letter of religious symbols, and to uncover their latent meaning by inverting the relation that is expressed in mystified fashion in it. So the veneration of light (Lectures 126), or salt (ER 7), to pick just two out of the multiple examples cited by Feuerbach, signals the importance of light and salt for human beings, the fact that light and salt are “godly,” in other words, essentially important for, human beings. Similarly, the material objects involved in Christian sacraments, water, bread, and wine, signal the importance of water as primary element and of the two basic types of food for humanity (EC 275–276). The psychology of religious belief If a subject realizes its essence only when it engages fully in interactions with its essential objects, then the subject is in fact intrinsically dependent on these objects. Such dependency can be called a negation of the self: its objects are other than the self and they prevent the self from being in full control of its own self just by itself. The subject can only be fully itself therefore if, to speak like Hegel once more, it can somehow “be at home” in its others. Religion for Feuerbach is the most potent way with which humanity seeks to ensure this. The creation of external, divine beings aims to fill the lack and dependency at the heart of human beings, and to give to them a sense of completion. Religion is nothing but that feeling of dependence by which man is more or less conscious that he does not and cannot exist without another being, different from himself, and that his existence does not originate in himself. (ER 2) This dependency relates to two different kinds of beings: natural ones, and other human beings. Historically speaking, religious people initially venerated all kinds of natural beings, from weather phenomena (like thunder) to particular material elements (like salt), objects (the sun), or environments (a lake or indeed a whole landscape), and of course animals. As humanity became gradually aware that natural phenomena and the attributes of natural beings were in fact merely external beings that were not directly possessed by divine powers, the “feeling of dependence” (Bedürftigkeitsgefühl) narrowed down to the human self and nature as a whole, with 4 FE U E R BACH , LUDWIG the representation of an all-powerful being as the cause of nature. This, for Feuerbach, explains the difference between what he calls “natural religions,” focusing on the human being’s vulnerability to external, natural beings, and “spiritual religions,” in other words monotheisms, where the function of the divine being is to provide an inflated image of the human self and thereby to reassure it of its importance, indeed, its immortality (EC 150–159). This anthropological ground of religion lends itself to a direct translation in psychological terms. Feuerbach developed a whole conceptual vocabulary to account for the origins of religion in those terms. The feeling of dependence produces a number of emotional states that are expressed and, for the negative ones, compensated, through religious artifacts: gifts and ceremonies, and the discourses and objects that accompany them, to express thankfulness, wonderment, the plea to have some desire fulfilled, a fear that must be atoned (ER 28–29; Theogonie 32–33). At the root of all these emotional states, Feuerbach identifies a fundamental layer, which he tried to describe in different ways throughout his work. The term he settled for in his 1848 lectures was that of “egoism.” By this, Feuerbach means the intrinsic interest human beings have in persisting in their own being, first as a basic “drive to maintain oneself in existence” (Selbsterhaltungstrieb), but also as a drive to avoid suffering and to experience full flourishing. It is basically a form of self-love, which he shows to be a necessary condition of subjectivity (Lectures 60–61, 92). At that level, Feuerbach’s analysis becomes amazingly prescient of Freud (see freud, sigmund), not just the latter’s specific writings on religion, but more broadly, of his deep-psychological view of the subject. In many passages spread throughout his writings, Feuerbach develops the intuition according to which the human ego is a fragile psychic instance that is caught between the diverging demands stemming from reality, from what we might call the reality principle, and a principle inherent in the human soul, which makes the human being crave total fulfillment, access to a state of absolute bliss and omnipotence. The reality principle inflicts pain and suffering, not just through direct physical and psychic injuries to the self, but simply by forcing boundaries onto it. The reason why such limitation is particularly painful is because human selves are driven by a deep affective principle, which totally disregards the demands from reality and the limitations of the individual human being. This ultimate layer of the human psyche, Feuerbach calls “Glückseligkeitstrieb,” a drive to happiness, the compelling search for full felicity (Seligkeit). Such a drive, being so fundamental a force in the human psyche, gives enormous affective weight to what Feuerbach summarizes by a term usually translated as “wish” (Wunsch), which for him is the urge to have one’s desires fulfilled without limitation, in time or in extension. Ultimately, it is this deep-psychological layer that explains the imperious force of the religious sentiment: “belief is nothing else but the conviction or certainty the wish has of its own fulfillment” (Theogonie 41). Religion is the dream for omnipotence (Allmacht): “The universal wish that there be no natural necessity, no limitation, no opposition to the human being, to human wishes – the wish that everything work in favour of the human being, nothing against her” (Luther 372). FE U E R BACH , LUDWIG 5 Religious expressions, on this account, are therefore merely expressions, in the mystified form described above, of deep anxieties and desires structuring humanity. They tell the “history of human throes” (EC 89). This deep source, Feuerbach argues, explains why prayer and sacrifice are the two fundamental forms of religious expression. “Prayer is the unconditional confidence of human feeling in the absolute identity of the subjective and the objective, the certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of Nature, that the heart’s need is absolute necessity” (EC 123). Sacrifice on the other hand, makes perceptible the whole essence of religion. Its source is the feeling of dependence, fear, doubt, the uncertainty of success, of future events, the scruples of conscience on account of a sin committed; but the result, the purpose of the sacrifice is self-consciousness, courage, enjoyment, the certainty of success, liberty and happiness. As a servant of Nature I observe the sacrifice; as her master I depart from it. (ER 30) Underneath the particular needs, desires, and anxieties expressed in prayers and sacrifices, what can be heard is the human beings’ desire to have their wishes fulfilled, the intense force of narcissism. All religions as a result have something to do with magic, that is, with the desire to lift the boundaries of the possible and the real, and to achieve immediately what the person most deeply desires. All religions operate on the logic of the dream: “dreaming is the key to the mysteries of religion” (EC 141, see also Lectures 220). Comparative and historical hermeneutics of religion These psychological insights provide a general key for understanding all religious phenomena. They explain the most primitive forms of religion as well as non-Western religions, accounts of which began to amass at the time from the travels of geographers and colonialists. They also unveil the mechanisms behind the grand theologies constructed by the monotheistic faiths. Yet this same set of general, deep-psychological explanatory principles also contain the keys to studying religions in more specific hermeneutic ways, from comparative and historical perspectives. If the focus is put on a specific religion, the different aspects of it will have to be considered, first, in terms of the specific ways in which a people relates to its geography. Early religions were religions of a particular place, expressing a veneration for the natural environment or the nation within in (Lectures 24). Subsequently, for each particular religion, the different aspects of the cult and that society’s myths pertain to different dimensions of the human beings at the specific stage of cultural development at which they are placed in their society: “the gods of human beings differ only according to the different good deeds which they provide to the humans, only according to the different drives (Triebe) and needs of human beings they fulfill; the different objects of religion differ only according to the different faculties and aptitudes of the human being, to which they relate” (Lectures 62). 6 FE U E R BACH , LUDWIG Feuerbach seems to defend an evolutionistic view of religion. In The Essence of Christianity, he continues to characterize Christianity, like Hegel, as “the absolute religion,” by which they mean that it is the religion that accomplishes the identity of the human and the divine spirits, and thus represents the end point of humanity’s spiritual development. Underneath this teleological perspective lies a view of culture as gradual mastery gained over nature, and humanity’s conscious appropriation of its own forces enabling this mastery. From this point of view, religion corresponds to the first stage in humanity’s attempt to control its own destiny in the face of its intrinsic dependencies. At the level of species, this stage is one of helplessness, which can be compared to childhood for the individual, where mastery over one’s own fate is ensured through magical thinking and a total reliance on more powerful external beings. Since such states involve imagination rather than reason, magical rather than critical thinking, they are in fact states of “unculture,” as nature and the self are known only through the mystifying frameworks of imaginary projections (Lectures 234). As true knowledge about nature and the self progresses, the deification of nature gradually regresses, leading to the shift to monotheism. In “heathenism,” nature is personified into beings that are inflated versions of human powers, as in the Roman and Greek pantheons; whereas in monotheisms, it is rather the individual self who is deified over against Nature (ER 44–47). This teleological view of the history of religion, however, is far from onedirectional. First, all religions, including the ones appearing later in time remain a form of mystification and magical thinking. From the point of view of “culture” as defined above, religion is always a regressive phenomenon. The process of enlightenment demands that religion be gotten rid of once and for all. This is all the more the case as religion tends to play into the hand of social and political oppression. The main thing for me is to shed light on the dark being of religion through the flame of reason, so that the human being can finally stop being a prey, a playing ball, of all those human powers that are enemies of the human, those powers which from times immemorial and today still continue to use the darkness of religion to serve the oppression of humanity. (Lectures 30) Second, the naivety of early, natural religions in fact has advantages by comparison with later, “spiritual” religions. This is because “paganism” operates on the basis of a genuine acknowledgment of the diversity and power of nature and indeed acknowledges the fact that humanity has its roots, as a species and in each new individual, in nature. The naive fear of, and wonderment at, nature entails a deep wisdom that countervails the unscientific backwardness of natural religions: the fact that humanity is not separate from, but depends upon, natural realms. This explains why Feuerbach consistently presents himself as a modern pagan: I can find in natural religion the confirmation of the impact nature has on me as a sensible being … I sympathise with the religious worshippers of nature; I am myself a passionate wonderer and worshipper of her; I can understand, not through books, not through learned proofs, but rather through immediate intuitions and impressions of FE U E R BACH , LUDWIG 7 nature, how the old peoples and indeed so many peoples still today, can venerate her as a divinity. (Lectures 103) This puts the evolutionist narrative on its head. For the implication of these two views – that all religions are in fact forms of magical thinking, and that earlier, nonmonotheistic religions at least showed in “analogical” fashion an open attitude to nature – is that, by contrast, modern monotheisms, and in particular Christianity, add to religious mystification a radical alienation from nature. In this inverse narrative of teleological development, Christianity represents the culmination of the process by which human beings detach themselves from their constitutive dependencies, not just the natural ones, but also what modern philosophers call intersubjective dependencies, that is, the constitutive relations with intimate and with distant others that contribute to the shaping of a human individual. Christianity in this conception is the final stage in the attempt by human individuals to project their own desires and capacities into an all-powerful being whose central psychological role is to consecrate the individualized self over against its constitutive relationships. The theological doctrines of creation ex nihilo, of fall and providence, the Christian version of heaven, are all interpreted by Feuerbach as intellectualized narratives rationalizing the deep wish for autarkic personhood that is characteristic of the modern (Western) self. Christianity therefore has an intrinsically ambiguous status in the history of human development. On the one hand, it can claim a form of cultural superiority over natural religions, since it corresponds to an adaptation of the universal psychic logic at play in religious belief to later stages of cultural, scientific development (Lectures 234). On the other hand, however, because it represents the culmination of humanity’s alienation from its natural and social dependencies, it is in fact a cultural regression. The contempt for the body, for sexual intercourse, the indifference to nature, now conceived as a dejected material outpouring by an all-powerful god with all-too-human traits – these are all signs of the “barbarity” and the “anti-cultural” dimension of Christianity: “The decline of [classical, pagan] culture was identical with the victory of Christianity … in its place there entered with Christianity the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supranaturalistic subjectivity; a principle intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture” (EC 132). Ultimately, however, this thoroughly negative view of Christianity still fits in an evolutionist account, one that anticipates Nietzsche’s diagnosis of modern Christianity as the ultimate stage in nihilism (see nietzsche, friedrich). On this account, Christianity is the stage in the history of religious mystification where humans have most fully alienated themselves from external and internal nature. Christian theology is a mess of logical contradictions, as the second part of the Essence of Christianity seeks to expose in detail. This demonstrates the utter contradiction with itself and with its supporting environment human culture has landed in in this latest development. But the work of hermeneutic enlightenment shows to humanity that it is only its own needs and powers that it contemplates in its religious creations. Indeed, the hermeneutic work shows to all nations that they all share the same fund of desires and 8 FE U E R BACH , LUDWIG anxieties, beyond their cultural and religious differences. A new religion can therefore dialectically arise out of Christian alienation, through this hermeneutic work, one in which humanity no longer walks on its head. This new “religion” is the radically universalist humanism, which forms the anthropological core of Marx’s critical project (see marx, karl). See also: barth, karl; enlightenment; freud, sigmund; hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich; hermeneutics and interpretation; marx, karl; nietzsche, friedrich REFERENCES Not all Feuerbach texts on religion are translated into English. When available the English translations are listed, otherwise as they appear in the collected works in German (Gesammelte Werke). Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1830) 1980. Thoughts on Death and Immortality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1841) 1989. The Essence of Christianity. New York: Prometheus Books. Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1844) 1990. The Essence of Faith According to Luther. In Feuerbach 1967–, Volume 9, 353–412. Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1846) 2004. The Essence of Religion. New York: Prometheus Books. Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1848) 1984. Lectures on the Essence of Religion. In Feuerbach 1967–, Volume 6. Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1857) 1985. Theogonie. In Feuerbach 1967–, Volume 7. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1967–. Gesammelte Werke. 21 vols. Edited by W. Schuffenhauer. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. FURTHER READING Gooch, Todd. 2016. “Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ludwigfeuerbach (accessed 17 June 2020). Harvey, Van A. 1995. Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, Van A. 2009. “Ludwig Feuerbach.” In The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, edited by Graham R. Oppy and N.N. Trakakis, Volume 4, 133–144. New York: Oxford University Press. Wartofsky, Marx W. 1977. Feuerbach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.