Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–1872) was a German philosopher, anthropologist and critic of religion, and one of the leading figures among the Young Hegelians. He stands between the idealism of Hegel and the materialism that shaped much nineteenth-century thought, and he is often called the intellectual father of modern atheistic humanism. His importance lies in moving the question of the divine into the study of concrete human beings.

The son of a prominent jurist, he began with theology at Heidelberg, grew disillusioned with his teachers and moved to Berlin to study directly under Hegel. His first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), appeared anonymously and was denounced as scandalous for its attack on personal immortality. Once his authorship became known, it closed the door of university teaching to him for good. For much of his life he lived in rural seclusion at Bruckberg, supported by his wife Bertha Löw's share in a family porcelain factory.

His relationship with Hegel moved from admiration to open rupture. In 1839 he published a critique of Hegelian philosophy, and in 1841 came The Essence of Christianity, his best-known work. For Feuerbach, idealism was the most abstract form of theology: it placed thought above being and turned a human product into an Absolute. Philosophy, he argued, should take the sensuous, living human being as its true subject. His claim that the secret of theology is anthropology sums up the program. In his account, God is a projection of human qualities such as reason, love and will, which people attribute to an ideal being and then worship as something above themselves. Religion thus becomes a form of self-alienation rooted in unmet needs and desires. Feuerbach did not see himself as an enemy of religion so much as a critic who wanted to recover the human truth hidden inside its mystified form.

His thought combined a sensualism that gave priority to perception over speculation with a materialism that rejected any philosophy beginning from the immaterial. In lectures given in Heidelberg in 1848–1849, later published as Lectures on the Essence of Religion, he traced belief to the drive for happiness and the fear of death, set against humanity's encounter with nature. Although students of the period hailed him, he kept a skeptical distance from the Revolution of 1848. In 1870 he joined the German Social Democratic Party, and he died in 1872 in Rechenberg, near Nuremberg.

His influence was considerable. Engels later recalled that they had all been Feuerbachians. Marx took over Feuerbach's inversion of Hegel and his theory of alienation, but in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) he faulted a materialism that was too contemplative and treated humanity as a static essence rather than as practical, social and historical activity. Feuerbach's critique of religion also left its mark on Nietzsche and Freud, and it reached popular culture through the cover of Jethro Tull's Aqualung album in the 1970s.