Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas
Feuerbach, FOY uhr bahk, Ludwig Andreas, LOOT vihk ahn DRAY uhs |
Ludwig Feuerbach � (1804-1872); German Philosopher He studied under G. W. F. Hegel, but later turned from Hegel's philosophical idealism and instead stressed the scientific study of humanity.
� In Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), Feuerbach challenged Christian doctrines. However, he actually placed a high value on religion, because he thought it expressed, in an inverted form, humanity's idea of its true essence. Feuerbach presented this idea in his major work, The Essence of Christianity (1841). He argued that though religion represents human creativity as if it depends on God, in reality God is just the projection of an ideal image of humanity's own capacities.
� Feuerbach also believed philosophers such as Hegel had an excessively abstract view of human nature, and had missed the significance of concrete physical experience. Feuerbach's ideas influenced Karl Marx. But Marx attacked Feuerbach for merely criticizing views of the human condition, rather than acting directly to improve it. Feuerbach was born in Landshut.
� - - -Karl Ameriks Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Univ. of Notre Dame.
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Ludwig Feuerbach is best known as the author of a sensational criticism of Christianity in the mid-nineteenth century. Although some scholars regard this criticism of Christianity as important in its own right, most view it pertinent because of its anticipation of the views of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.
Fuerbach claims: God is basically a projection of humanity's best
intention and goals. People stopped thinking Fuerbachian-ly before the end of
WW I and definitely by the end of WW II.
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If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism--at least in the sense of this work--is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.
Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find
ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we
only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice,
instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
The present age . . . prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to
the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence . . . for in
these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
