Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804–1872)

Important representative of classical German philosophy; outstanding materialist philosopher.

Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804, in Landshut, Bavaria, into a famous criminologist’s family. In 1823, he studied theology at the University of Heidelberg, but in 1824, became interested in Hegel’s philosophy, and passed to the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he studied philosophy under the tutorship of Hegel and became a member of the Young Hegelians. In 1828, he earned his Doctorate in philosophy with his paper On the Infinitude, Unity, and Universality of Reason, and in 1829 he began to work as a lecturer at the University of Erlangen, teaching courses on the history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, so forth. In 1830, he anonymously published his first work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, which criticized the idea of personal immortality, proposing that only universal reason is immortal and that the religious theology of the immortality of the soul is absurd. This radical idea of him offended the Christian doctrine, the spiritual pillar of feudal rule in Germany, consequently he was persecuted and dismissed from his chair. In 1837, Feuerbach was forced to live in the remote countryside of Bruckberg, Middle Franconia, where he depended on his wife’s share in a small Porcelain factory.

In 1839, Feuerbach published On Philosophy and Christianity and began to criticize Hegel’s philosophy. In the same year, Feuerbach made his first public break with Hegelianism in the paper, Toward a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy, which severely criticized Hegelian idealism, i.e., the culmination of speculative philosophy from its epistemological roots. Marx considered this as Feuerbach’s first decisive attack on Hegel, with sober philosophy against drunken speculation. This paper marked Feuerbach’s complete break with Hegelian philosophy, becoming a materialist and beginning to establish his own anthropological materialism. In summarizing the evolution of his world outlook, Feuerbach also pointed out: “God was my first thought, Reason my second, Man my third and last thought. The subject of the deity is reason, but the subject of reason is man.”

In 1841, Feuerbach published his most renowned representative work, The Essence of Christianity. The book pointed out that God is nothing but the reflection of the essence of man in fantasy, and became a “Declaration of Independence” proclaiming the independent power of man and nature. Proclaiming materialism and atheism, the work dealt a heavy blow to religious theology and speculative philosophy, and played a great role in emancipating the minds in the advanced intellectual circles of Germany and even Europe at that time. As the next step, Feuerbach gave a theoretical proof for his viewpoint of anthropological materialism. In 1842 he wrote The Necessity for A Reform of Philosophy and Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy. In 1843, he published the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, which further developed the basic ideas in his Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy, and put forth that task of modern philosophy is to make God real and human, that is, to transform theology into anthropology, marking the completion of the theoretical form of anthropological materialism. In 1845, he extended his critique of Christianity to the critique of all religions and published his book The Essence of Religion. In 1849, Feuerbach gave a systematic lecture on the critique of religion at the Heidelberg Town Hall, gave a detailed elucidation on his book The Essence of Religion. In 1851, these lectures were published as a book, entitled as Lectures on the Essence of Religion. Although these works continued to reflect his atheistic and anthropological-materialist views, they also further displayed the abstract and metaphysical nature of his philosophical views. Feuerbach’s later works include The Theogonie (1857), his essay Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, with Special Reference to the Freedom of the Will (1863–1866), and On Happiness (1867–1869), which, although continued to promote his materialistic and atheistic thoughts, mainly promoted and exerted his ethical and moral ideas. Feuerbach criticized classical German idealism and religious theology with anthroposophical materialism, broke the dominance of idealism in Germany, restored the authority of materialism properly, and argued for the principle of the identity of thinking and being on the basis of materialism, which is the basic kernel of Feuerbach’s materialism and one of the direct theoretical sources of Marxist philosophy. However, Feuerbach’s materialism was contemplative, metaphysical materialism. Although his conception of nature is materialistic, his conception of history is idealist; he explained social life and socio-historical development proceeding from the abstract man or human essence, which is half-hearted materialism and has an inconsistency in terms of materialism. Feuerbach died in Nuremberg on September 13, 1872.