Feuerbach’s central claim in The Essence of Christianity is that religion is an alienated form of human self-consciousness insofar as it involves the relation of human beings to their own essence as though to a being distinct from themselves. Although Feuerbach in developing this claim was clearly influenced by Hegel’s account of “unhappy consciousness” in the Phenomenology, Ameriks’ contention that “Feuerbach’s philosophical doctrines […] can be understood as little more than a filling out of the details of Hegel’s scathing account of orthodox Christianity as a form of ‘unhappy consciousness’” is problematic for several reasons.30 First, it overlooks the likelihood of Hegel’s having understood his analysis of unhappy consciousness to apply to the otherworldliness he associated with medieval Catholicism, or perhaps to otherworldly religion more generally, but not in any case to the type of Protestantism that he regarded as “the religion of the modern age” and in which he found the sacred and the secular reconciled.31 Second, it overlooks the fact that Feuerbach’s appropriation of themes found in Hegel’s account of unhappy consciousness occurs in the context of an explicit, albeit incomplete repudiation of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit. Unlike Hegel, who conceives of unhappy consciousness as a moment in the development of human self-consciousness that is also a moment in the coming-to-be-for-itself of the absolute, Feuerbach has by this time reached the conclusion that one cannot distinguish absolute spirit from “subjective spirit or the essence of man” without, in the end, continuing to occupy “the old standpoint of theology.”32 Third, it overlooks the significance of Feuerbach’s emphasis on the importance for grasping the essence of religion of precisely those subjective aspects of religious consciousness (imagination and feeling) that Hegel himself regarded as inessential or at least of secondary importance. Finally, in connection with this third point, it overlooks the significance of Feuerbach’s agreement with Spinoza against Hegel that faith “requires not so much truth as piety.”33
In a short essay published in 1842, in which he sought to clarify the difference between his own approach to the philosophy of religion and Hegel’s, Feuerbach suggested that this difference is most evident in the relations in which each of them stands to Schleiermacher, who famously defined religion as the feeling of utter dependence. Whereas Hegel had “rebuked” Schleiermacher for abdicating the truth-claims of Christianity in taking the articles of faith as expressions of this feeling, Feuerbach says he does so only because Schleiermacher was prevented by his “theological prejudice” from drawing the unavoidable conclusion that, “if feeling is subjectively what religion is chiefly about, then God is objectively nothing but the essence of feeling.”34 These comments obscure the fact that, in The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach himself had conceived of God as an alienated projection of the human species-essence, which he had identified primarily with the distinctively human capacity for self-consciousness, and which was said to include reason and will, as well as feeling. They nevertheless reflect Feuerbach’s generally overlooked deployment against Hegel of resources derived from the philosophies of feeling of Schleiermacher and Jacobi,35 and they indicate the direction in which his thinking about religion continued to move after the publication of The Essence of Christianity, namely, away from an emphasis on species-consciousness conceived along Hegelian lines, and toward what Van Harvey has aptly designated the “naturalist-existentialist” themes that predominate in his later writings on religion.36
Whereas in The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach encapsulated his position in the phrase, “theology is anthropology,” by the end of the 1840s he had augmented this phrase to include “anthropology and physiology.”37 This modification reflects his growing awareness in the intervening period of the importance of corporeality in human psychology. This awareness is reflected in the emphasis placed in his later theorizing about religion on the Glückseligkeitstrieb or drive-to-happiness, the feeling of dependence on nature by which this drive is restricted, and the powerful wish of human beings to be relieved of the painful limitations imposed on them by their anthropological constitution as self-conscious, embodied subjects. Foremost among these is the fear of death. Whereas previously Feuerbach had unfavorably contrasted the “practical standpoint” of religion with the “theoretical standpoint” of philosophy, in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) we find him insisting that philosophy must itself “take the place of religion,” by which he means that it must “come down from its divine and self-sufficient blissfulness in thought and open its eyes to human misery”38—a point not lost on Marx, who wrote to him in August 1844, with reference to the Principles and to Feuerbach’s book, The Essence of Faith According to Luther (1844), that in them he had, intentionally or not, “given socialism a philosophical foundation.”39
41.4 BRUNO BAUER, KARL MARX, AND MAX STIRNER
It is an indication of his enormous academic promise that, as the relatively untested protégé of the Berlin theologian, P. K. Marheineke, under whose name he later edited the second edition of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, Bauer was invited by the editors of the Berlin Annals to review in succession each of the two volumes of Strauss’ Life of Jesus.40 On the basis of these reviews, in which he criticized Strauss from an apologetic standpoint, Bauer was initially counted by Strauss among the Hegelians of the Right.41 By the time his license to teach was revoked in 1842, Bauer had taken up a position on the extreme Left, which he nevertheless continued to develop largely in opposition to Strauss.42 Between 1838 and 1843 he published three major works in the field of biblical theology, including a two-volume study of the Old Testament and a three-volume critique of the Synoptic gospels. In the introduction to the former work, originally conceived as part of a larger Critique of the History of Revelation, Bauer laid out his plan to present the various moments of the concept of religion as reflected in the history of representations associated with several distinct stages in the development of the religious consciousness of the Hebrews, Jews, and early Christians. Each of these stages he regarded as a “necessary link” in the development of the self-consciousness of absolute spirit.43 For example, in the repudiation of idolatry by the biblical patriarchs he saw the emergence of an indirect awareness of spirit’s independence from nature.
By the time the first volume of his Synoptic trilogy appeared in 1841, initiating the process that led to his academic dismissal, Bauer had ceased to view the history of religion, together with the history of philosophy, art, and the state, as the development of the self-consciousness of absolute spirit, and had begun to regard these together as the history of the activity of human self-consciousness in its struggle toward the realization of its essential freedom. This involves a ceaseless effort to overcome the ossified positivity of its own prior creations, to which it is always in danger of allowing itself to be subjected. The task of “criticism” is to discern in the course of history the “ought” toward the actualization of which the labors of self-consciousness are directed, to exhibit in light of this standard the irrationality of existing conditions (das Bestehende), and thereby to precipitate their transformation. In connection with this change of views, and in continued opposition to Strauss, Bauer came to regard the canonical gospels as fictional creations of the individual biblical authors, and not as products of the mythological unconscious of the early Christian community. As an explanation of the process through which these gospels were composed, he argued, there is no difference in principle between saying that they resulted from the inspiration of the Holy Spirit or that they arose through the unconscious adaptation of pre-Christian messianic traditions by the mythological imagination of the early Christian community.44 Both explanations fail to acknowledge the creative role of the individual biblical authors and thereby to recognize that the canonical gospels are at the same time products of the individual self-consciousness of these authors and milestones in the world-historical development of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness as conceived by Bauer includes not only the subjective awarenes
s of individuals, but also the historical conditions by which that awareness is shaped, conditions which are themselves the product of the prior historical activity of self-consciousness.
In The Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist, the title and style of which mimic the tone employed by Leo in an anti-Hegelian pamphlet he published in 1838,45 Bauer poses as a pious believer concerned to warn Christian leaders charged with wielding the sword of temporal authority of the danger posed by Hegel’s philosophy to “all established things, and above all to religion, the sole foundation of the state.”46 Hegel himself is portrayed as a greater revolutionary than the rest of his disciples combined, and a greater threat to the German-Christian state than Napoleon’s armies had been. In the role of the Posaunist or Trumpeter, Bauer distinguishes between a first and a second “appearance” of piety by which it is possible for the unsuspecting student of Hegel to be deceived. The first is the appearance according to which Hegel’s references to the Trinitarian God as to that which alone is truly real are taken as indications of the compatibility of Hegel’s philosophy with belief in a God who existed prior to the creation of the world, from which he remains categorically distinct. This is the appearance by which Hegel’s theistic disciples are supposedly deceived. The second appearance of piety, in which Strauss and certain other Hegelians are said to have “cloaked themselves,” involves a conception of the underlying truth of religion as consisting in a dialectical substance-relation wherein the individual spirit relinquishes its mere particularity and sacrifices itself to the universal, “which as substance—or, as it is more often called—the absolute Idea, has power over it.”47 Here the history of religion is conceived as part of the larger historical process through which substance labors toward self-consciousness and becomes subject.
This second appearance of piety the Posaunist refers to as “the appearance of pantheism,” itself a threat to orthodox Christianity, though still not as dangerous as “the thing itself,” namely, the conception of the religious relation as an internal relation within self-consciousness. Here the powers attributed to the absolute Idea are recognized as objectifications or projections of the powers of self-consciousness, and the substance-relation is reduced to a transitory moment in the dialectical development of self-consciousness, wherein the finitude of the empirical ego is sublated, and self-consciousness comes into possession of the knowledge of its own universality. The end of this movement, however, is not substance but self-consciousness, “which has actually posited itself as infinite and taken into itself the universality of substance as its essence.”48 Self-consciousness henceforth recognizes itself as the sole true divinity and moving force in history, which Bauer conceives of as the laborious process of externalization and re-appropriation through which self-consciousness produces itself. This, as the Posaunist would have it, is the atheistic “kernel of the system,” with which Hegel’s pantheistic interpreters remain unacquainted, since they would otherwise have recognized that “God is dead for philosophy and only the I of self-consciousness […] lives, creates, effects [wirkt] and is all.”49 Bauer’s argument is thus equally directed against the champions of orthodox supernaturalism, Right Hegelian theists, and those Left Hegelians who interpret Hegel pantheistically or who, like Feuerbach, ascribe to the human species-essence a “power that exists for itself independently of […] the self-creating personality.”50
During the period of Marx’s university studies, he and Bauer were closely associated.51 A surviving letter of Bauer’s suggests that, in the early 1840s, 1840 the two discussed plans to co-edit a journal that they considered calling Das Archiv des Atheismus. This reflects the fact that Marx’s commitment to atheism preceded by several years what can be referred to only cautiously as his commitment to materialism. The proximity of Marx’s early thinking to Bauer’s is reflected in his invocation in the preface to his doctoral dissertation of the following “proclamation” uttered by Prometheus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “in a word, I detest all Gods.” This Marx took to be “philosophy’s […] own profession,” involving a declaration of enmity “against all the gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”52 Although Marx would soon complain that the philosophers had only sought to interpret the world, whereas the point is to change it, if he indeed wrote in the early 1880s that “The religion of the workers has no God because it seeks to restore the divinity of man,”53 this would suggest that his renunciation of philosophy’s theoretical ambitions did not involve a repudiation of what he had characterized four decades earlier as “philosophy’s profession.”
In spite of his deserved reputation as one of the most influential atheists in history, because by 1843—and thus not long after the beginning of his activity as a writer—Marx had already come to regard the critique of religion as “essentially completed,”54 this is not a task to which he devoted many of his considerable intellectual energies.55 There is consequently not to be found in any of Marx’s major writings a sustained treatment of religion per se. The following interrelated points need nevertheless to be emphasized in this context. First, because Marx thought of the critique of religion as “the presupposition of all critique,”56 it was only after he had come to regard this critique as essentially completed that he was prepared to turn his attention to the critique of the state and of civil society. Second, when Marx speaks here of the critique of religion as having been essentially completed, it is specifically the critiques of religion developed by Feuerbach and Bauer that he has in mind. This is important because of the extent to which the “presupposition” that these critiques of religion embodied for Marx is one that continued to inform the critiques of the state and of civil society that he began to develop first in his early commentary on portions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and then in his early economic studies and in The German Ideology, where he first articulated the basic conceptual framework that continues to underlie his later writings, including Das Kapital. Third, Marx’s distinctive contribution to the development of philosophical atheism in the nineteenth century consists largely in an important modification of his understanding of the relationship between religious alienation (i.e. religious consciousness as a form of alienated consciousness) and “real” or economic alienation, to which he was led as a result of his analysis of the latter.
Reminiscing in the 1880s, 1880 Engels recalled the publication of The Essence of Christianity in 1841 as having broken “the spell” cast by Hegel’s system on him and Marx, allowing them to entertain as entirely new the thoughts that nature “exists independently of philosophy,” that human beings and their conscious lives are ontologically dependent upon their sensuous existence as part of nature, and that, apart from nature and man, nothing else exists. It was in embracing these claims that Marx and Engels are said to have become enthusiastic Feuerbachians “at once.”57 This enthusiasm was destined to be short-lived, but is not for that reason unimportant, since the influence of Feuerbach is detectable in a number of the central themes that first appear in Marx’s so-called Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts, and continue in various ways to reappear in his later works. These include the idea that human beings exist only as part of nature and in relation to physical objects upon which they depend for the satisfaction of their essential needs; that the activity through which human beings create themselves does not consist solely, or even primarily, in the labor of spirit, but in physical labor involving the transformation of their material environment; that human beings are distinguished from other beings by their possession of self-consciousness; that the distinctive kinds of economic activity in which they engage are ones that involve intentionality and linguistic mediation; that human beings are species-beings who are only able to do many of the distinctively human things they do as a result of their participation in society; and that because human beings are self-conscious species-beings, they are able to become estranged or alienated from their species-essence.
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nbsp; While these characteristically Marxian themes can be shown in various ways to have been taken over from Feuerbach, others that are equally distinctive of Marx’s position as it came to be articulated in the mid-1840s are better thought of as resulting from his attempt to retrieve the emphasis placed in the idealistic tradition on the self-constituting activity of human subjects, and to reconceive this emphasis in light of Feuerbach’s recognition of the anthropological importance of sensuousness and corporeality. It is this effort that led Marx to the recognition that, while it is true that human beings have physical needs, it is also true that from the moment they first begin to transform nature through their labor, and to create the tools with which to do so, they create for themselves new and different needs, so that, in changing their environment, they change themselves as well. At the risk of oversimplification, one could do worse than to suggest that Marx’s distinctive achievement consists in combining Bauer’s insight (originally Hegel’s) that human self-consciousness is always the product of its own prior activity with Feuerbach’s acknowledgment of the ontological dependence of human consciousness on nature in order to arrive at the novel thesis, that, in the process of transforming nature to meet their needs, human beings inevitably transform themselves, so that their consciousness, including their religious conceptions and the values associated with them, is the result of the collective development of their productive powers over the course of many generations.
It is this dawning awareness of the role of sensuous human activity in the self-creation of human beings that led Marx, in spite of his acknowledgment that the critique of religion had been completed, to develop a distinctively new understanding both of the dynamics of alienation and of the sense in which religious consciousness may be said to be a form of alienated or “false” consciousness. Whereas Marx’s Hegelian predecessors, including Hegel himself, tended to think of alienation as a form of consciousness (several, actually) involving a failure to recognize oneself in what one experiences as other than oneself, and Feuerbach and Bauer seem at times (at least prior to 1848/9) to have expected by means of their atheistic philosophical therapy to be able to usher in the humanistic millennium, Marx came to regard the alienation that occurs in religious consciousness as a mere symptom of the “real,” economic alienation that occurs under the capitalist system of production, which requires workers to sell their labor in order to secure an existence that barely qualifies as human.58 What needs especially to be emphasized here is the structural similarity between Feuerbach’s account of God as an alienated projection of the human species-essence and Marx’s analyses of money and commodities as human creations to whose fate the very human beings who create them is made subject, for which reason Marx transfers to them the enmity declared by Prometheus against the gods.59 “Fetishism,” a term used by Marx to refer to the attitude toward commodities that prevails under capitalism, was, after all, commonly used by nineteenth-century Europeans to refer to what they considered to be the crudest form of idolatry, which in all its forms involves the direction toward a mere creature of the veneration (latreia) that is properly due to the creator alone—in this case “Man,” the only divinity whose reality Marx was prepared to acknowledge.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 155
