Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy on Superphysics

Foreword

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In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx relates how the two of us in Brussels in the year 1845 set about: “to work out in common the opposition of our view” — the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx — to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience.

Hegel

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A philosophical revolution ushered in the political collapse:

Materialism

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The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being.

From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.

The Doctrine of Hegel

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We do not need to ask whether this outlook in line with natural science.

Natural science predicts a possible end for the Earth.

Therefore, it recognizes that the history of mankind too has an ascending and a descending branch.

Karl Marx

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Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, Feuerbach were the offshoots of Hegelian philosophy.

Strauss, after his Life of Jesus and Dogmatics, produced only literary studies in philosophy and ecclesiastical history after the fashion of Renan.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The real idealism of Feuerbach is shown by his philosophy of religion and ethics.

He wants to perfect religion, not abolish it.

Philosophy itself must be absorbed in religion.

The periods of humanity are distinguished only by religious changes. A historical movement is fundamental only when it is rooted in the hearts of men. The heart is not a form of religion, so that the latter should exist also in the heart; the heart is the essence of religion. (Quoted by Starcke, p.168.)