Bruno Bauer (1809–1882)

German idealist philosopher; researcher of religion and history; representative figure of the Young Hegelians.

Bauer was born in 1809, in Eisenberg, Germany. He taught theology at the University of Berlin from 1834 to 1839 and at the University of Bonn from 1839 to 1842. He was a student of Hegel, has studied theology under him and completed his doctoral dissertation Prinzipien des Schönen (Principles of the Beautiful) under his supervision. After 1839, Bauer became an important theorist of the Young Hegelian and a representative of the philosophy of self-consciousness. In 1842, he was stripped of his teaching position because of his sharp criticism of the Bible. He became a friend of Marx from 1837 to early 1842, a contributor to the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, a contributor to the Neue Preussische Zeitung (Kreuz-Zeitung) after the revolution in 1848–1849, and a member of the National Liberal Party after 1866, and wrote some works on the history of Christianity.

From the standpoint of subjective idealism, Bauer claimed that “self-consciousness” was the most powerful creative force in history, holding that history represented the dialectical progression of human self-consciousness, and that Christianity appeared at a certain stage of history. He held that the origin of the world and the driving force of historical development was “self-consciousness”, while Christianity was only a fantastic product of self-consciousness, and that only “those who can think critically” possessed such “self-consciousness”, and intellectuals and men of genius were the embodiment of such “self-consciousness” and the representatives of “spirit”, and the people’s masses were an inert force of historical development, “dull matter”. In On the Jewish Question, The Holy Family, The German Ideology and other works, Marx and Engels criticized and liquidated Bauer’s theory of religion and idealist conception of history.