2. Summary Overview of Feuerbach's Thought
A study of Feuerbach's philosophical development, says Marx 2
Wartofsky, is a veritable course in dialectical thinking. Feuerbach's aphorisms and self-contradictions have reddered him an impossible subject for categorization. Not only the inherent dialectic in his movement from idealism to "anthropologism", but also the recurrent irony and tactical reductionism throughout his works, leave little prospect for definitive interpretation. Yet some grasp of the overall character of his thought is crucial if we are to attempt to isolate what he says about any particular subject (or predicate!). Thus, before going on to what Feuerbach says about love, I will try to establish the most critical aspects in his thinking, covering the span of nearly half a century, insofar as such aspects are likely to relate to the idea of love.
t. CF. Bolin, Ludwig Feuerbach, op. cit, p. 1. Shortly before his death Feuerbach was considering writing a "key" to his life and works, "urn den Leuten die Augen zu offnen. Denn das Gebiet, das ich eigentliçh schon seit . <iVeissig Jahren bearbeite, ist ihnen noch immer eine terra incognita'.' Feuerbach's ambiguity is probably not unintentional. 2. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, op. cit. p . 7
(1) Feuerbach's Model of Consciousness Development
How a person comes to know anything, and specifically how he comes to know about himself, was a continuous question for Feuerbach. He developed his epistemology from exhaustive critiques of Descartes,
Leibniz, Hobbes, Bacon, Boehme, Hegel, and others. He differs from Descartes in that he refused to accept any dualism between mind and body. He differs from Hegel in refusing to accept any idea of absolute being, or idea of being. He insisted on beginning with "being itself" (human being, or Dasein). Feuerbach accepted no abstract mediation in self-consciousness dialectic. The 'other' must be a real other, a 'Thou', not imaginary. Information about the self is derived from identification of similar qualities in another of like species. The information is primarily interpreted through the senses and a developing 'feeling' (Sinnlichkeit). Reason is dependent upon sense and feeling, which are dependent upon matter. Hence there can be no ultimate separation between mind and matter. The interdependence of I and Thou constitutes an unfolding self-
consciousness, which is at the same time a "species-consciousness". =] Consciousness of self as member of a species is entailed in the
highest human feeling, love.
(2) Religion as "An Unself-conscious Self-consciousness"
The essence of the religious spirit is not thinking, or reason, but rather feeling and belief. Feuerbach makes great use of Luther: "My belief is my being." Belief is primal activity, the work of the imagination, upon which any 'practice' is dependent. Belief is of a different quality than reason, for it is grounded initially on images acquired through sense and feeling. "The image is the thing of religion." Imagination fills in the spaces of unrevealed data when an 'I' (subject) meets an inexplicable 'thou' (object). Hence the qualities of the subject are attributed to any encountered object which is alien or not fully understood. For example, the unpredictability of nature may be attributed to human caprice.
characterized as 'divine'. Although such anthropomorphic description is a necessary function of the imagination, constituting (tentative)
belief, it is wrong "to give reason to belief". The result leads
to abstract theology which is remote from concrete data, hypostases which are no longer accountable to history. Speculative philosophy falls into the same trap whenever absolutes are identified which are not subject to actual phenomena. Religion is, for Feuerbach, the unconscious attempt to gain species-knowledge by projecting human qualities onto non-human objects, characterized as divine. Although the human being is mistaken about the object he takes as a 'thou', he is not mistaken about the qualities he attributes to the object. In the characterization the imagination contributes to the development of human self-consciousness. The qualities attri buted to his gods are the qualities of the human being (at any given epoch).
(3) Inversion of .Subject and Predicate
Since feeling is prior to reason, and since religious images are the objectifications of feeling, one cannot apply reason directly to analysis of religious objects. The truth in religious statements lies not in the objects they purport to describe, but in the descrip tion of the objects. The descriptive predicate may therefore be taken as substantive. Religious statements cannot yield verifiable information about the images of religion, but they can yield verifi able (or at least highly correlative) information about the nature of humanity. Hence theology is converted to "anthropology". Philoso phy grounded on an abstract absolute beyond influence of an existent thinking, feeling, willing being (Dasein) is "nothing but" another form of theology. But empirical philosophy is also inadequate if it cannot comprehend human Sinnlichkeit in all modes (including love), "The senses serve not merely as sources of inference, but as bearers of the existence of things beyond them."^
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