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(2) Christ aè the- Corporate Object of -Human Self-Consciousness
While religion as the manifestation of human imagination is, unconsciously, the fulfilment of feeling in the creation of an object, a "thou", by which the human can understand his own nature, theology, Feuerbach says, is an abortive attempt to rationalize an illusion. It is one thing to objectify Jesus as the risen Lord, but quite another to attribute to him absolute qualities which are inflexible, impassible, and remote from human experience. Theology's great fault (and by implication, the fault of Hegel's later system of absolutes) is that it tends to crystallize the alienated image of religion in opposition to human experience, producing a wholly other, absolute, supernatural, and superhuman God.
As the images of religion are given rational form, the realiza tion of authentic human qualities in practice is inhibited. The true significance of the Incarnation, on the other hand, is the disclosure of God as essentially human, "brought down to earth". Rational theology, thought Feuerbach, would prefer to leave God in the heavens, characterized by such terms as omniscient, omnipotent, Creator-out-of-nothing, and impassible. But the Incarnation contains the secret that God is touchable, compassionate, capable of suffering - "a being of the heart". Only a deity who can truly understand human feeling, the depths of human experience, can break the opposi tion between human being and divine being. The objectification of Jesus as God is in truth the objectification of the human capacity to love, made visible through the primary image of human need: the idea of humanity become God.
The Christian religion's assertion that God has become human is not only the imaginative objectification of God's embodiment in a particular individual, but it is also the collection in that individual of the whole "species" of humanity. Jesus's suffering is the suffering of all humanity; Jesus' victory over evil and death is the (imagined) victory of all humankind. But the collection
of the species in one person is essentially the work of the imagina tion, and it is therefore an idea which is not subject to rational categorization.
Only love, admiration honour, in short only affect, only feeling, raises the individual to the level of our love, we exclaim: She is Beauty, Love, Goodness itself! But reason knows nothing of the actual, absolute Incarnation of the species in a particular individual... Incarnation and history are absolutely incompatible: where the Godhead enters into history, there history ends. But if history pursues its
course as before, the theory of incarnation is fact ually refuted by history itself.
In other words, says Feuerbach, the idea of corporate humanity is an ahistorical notion. History is a rational enterprise which assumes rational cause and effect. Corporate humanity, as an idea, is supra national; it is not 'historical', and therefore it cannot be included in historical understanding. The Incarnation is of a radically different quality, subject only to the quality of feeling, emotion, and imagination.
Although Christianity does indeed posit the 'many' represented in the 'one' (Christ), such a representation is not subject to ration al categories. In history, "the god of limitation stands as guardian of the gate." The idea of the Incarnation represents the unlimited imagery of corporate humanity, and is thus beyond rational method.
(Feuerbach is here suggesting that both Kantian ethics and Hegelian historical dialectic cannot cope with the idea of the Incarnation as the representation of the human species.)
Through the imagery of the Incarnation Feuerbach suggests that the problem of "the many and the one" has been solved unconsc-
2
iously. The whole of humanity is collected into the life, death, and 'resurrection' of one individual, in a form that is beyond the critique of history. The problem however, is that the reconciliation
1. Feuerbach, Zur Critik der Hegelschen Philosophie, Bolin-Jodl, II, op. cit. pp. 162-164; trans. Wartofsky in Feuerbach, op. cit, p . 177
2. For a more exhaustive account of Feuerbach's "Incarnation Theory", cf. Marx Wartofsky, Feuerbach, op. cit. pp. 226 ff.
has been achieved unconsciously, through the imagination, and object ified as a religious belief which is incapable of realizing that the union is relevant to the individual's connection to his species, in this world.
(3) Feuerbach's Epistemology: The:sEhcouhter of I and Thou
For Feuerbach, feeling objectified in the imagination is the very basis of knowledge. What is picked up through the senses is projected as an image in the brain where the image becomes the matter of thought. For him there is no thinking without images, much less without the matter that affords the primary stimuli for the brain
through sight, smell, touch, hearing, and tasting. Imagination
is therefore the border between mind and matter. Without its contri bution there would indeed be a dualism between them. But through the work of the imagination, sensation and feeling are the conditions
for thought. Organic, physical existence is the condition of sensa
tion and feeling, and only an existing being can think. Imagination is the link, therefore, between organic physical activity and the activity of thought. Feuerbach's synthesis between mind and matter has been described as "dialectical monism", that is, a philosophical unity in which matter is resolved through sense imagery into the material of thought.^
Since it is the objectification of sensory experience, as feeling, which brings consciousness of the external world to human beings, the feeling which arises as humans encounter others of their species brings to consciousness information about the species. At its highest pitch, this feeling is love. For Feuerbach, love is not just a feeling, it is the goal of all feeling.
A fully realized human being has the capacity to think, to will, and to love. These are the fullest realizations, the greatest powers, the absolute essence of man as man, and are the goal or end of his existence. Man exists in