Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas

(1804–1872)

German philosopher and anthropologist. Born in Landshut, Bavaria, Feuerbach studied theology and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin. He enjoyed only a sporadic teaching career, and lived mainly on income derived from his wife's interest in a pottery factory. His philosophical writings were fired by a perception that Hegel's system had failed to shake itself free from crippling rationalistic and religious elements. It is therefore itself but a stage in the true emergence of self-consciousness, in a humanistic, scientific, ‘philosophy of the future’. Feuerbach's chequered career was the outcome of his conviction that religion is a ‘dream of the human mind’, or an understandable but distorting projection of our emotional needs: ‘Christ is the love of mankind for itself embodied in an image.’ This sceptical and anthropological approach to religion is indeed similar in spirit to that of Hume and Voltaire, but proved more explosive in the religious and absolutist atmosphere of the mid-19th century. Feuerbach stands for opposition to any philosophical system-building in favour of an empirical study of the way persons respond to the world and to each other. His aphorism, ‘man is what he eats’, became a useful political slogan for subsequent radicals. Ethically Feuerbach believed that human relations vindicate a close, communitarian spirit in which divisions between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ become dissolved. His early writings include many contributions to the Hallesche Jahrbücher of which he was joint editor, and which had a decisive influence on the development of secular and political, or left-wing, Hegelianism . His most important work was Das Wesen des Christentums (1846), which was translated by the scholar and novelist George Eliot as The Essence of Christianity, 1854. Eliot was paid two shillings a page. She herself was more taken with Feuerbach's impassioned descriptions of self-sacrificing, sacred, self-sufficing and spontaneous love than with his humanism. Marx's Theses on Feuerbach combines an appreciation of Feuerbach's dialectical upstaging of Hegel with recognition that Feuerbach himself falls short of properly resolving self-consciousness, and its religious projections, into fundamental social and economic forces. Engels said of Feuerbach that the lower half of him was materialistic, but the upper half an idealist.