Ludwig Feuerbach
born July 28, 1804, Landshut, Bavaria [now in Germany]
died Sept. 13, 1872, Rechenberg, Ger.
German philosopher and moralist remembered for his influence
on Karl Marx and for his humanistic theologizing.
The fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul von Feuerbach,
Ludwig Feuerbach abandoned theological studies to become a
student of philosophy under G.W.F. Hegel for two years at
Berlin. In 1828 he went to Erlangen to study natural
science, and two years later his first book, Gedanken über
Tod und Unsterblichkeit (“Thoughts on Death and
Immortality”), was published anonymously. In this work
Feuerbach attacked the concept of personal immortality and
proposed a type of immortality by which human qualities are
reabsorbed into nature. His Abälard und Heloise (1834) and
Pierre Bayle (1838) were followed by Über Philosophie und
Christentum (1839; “On Philosophy and Christianity”), in
which he claimed “that Christianity has in fact long
vanished not only from the reason but from the life of
mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea.”
Continuing this view in his most important work, Das Wesen
des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity),
Feuerbach posited the notion that man is to himself his own
object of thought and religion nothing more than a
consciousness of the infinite. The result of this view is
the notion that God is merely the outward projection of
man’s inward nature. In the first part of his book, which
strongly influenced Marx, Feuerbach analyzed the “true or
anthropological essence of religion.” Discussing God’s
aspects “as a being of the understanding,” “as a moral being
or law,” “as love,” and others, he argued that they
correspond to different needs in human nature. In the second
section he analyzed the “false or theological essence of
religion,” contending that the view that God has an
existence independent of human existence leads to a belief
in revelation and sacraments, which are items of an
undesirable religious materialism.
Although Feuerbach denied that he was an atheist, he
nevertheless contended that the God of Christianity is an
illusion. As he expanded his discussion to other
disciplines, including philosophy, he came to see Hegel’s
principles as quasi-religious and embraced instead a form of
materialism that Marx subsequently criticized in his Thesen
über Feuerbach (written 1845). Attacking religious orthodoxy
during the politically turbulent years of 1848–49, Feuerbach
was seen as a hero by many of the revolutionaries. His
influence was greatest on such anti-Christian publicists as
David Friedrich Strauss, author of the skeptical Das Leben
Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (1835–36; The Life of Jesus
Critically Examined), and Bruno Bauer, who, like Feuerbach,
had abandoned Hegelianism for naturalism. Some of
Feuerbach’s views were later endorsed by extremists in the
struggle between church and state in Germany and by those
who, like Marx, led the revolt of labour against capitalism.
Among his other works are Theogonie (1857) and Gottheit,
Freiheit, und Unsterblichkeit (1866; “God, Freedom, and
Immortality”).
