Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (1804–72) was a German materialist philosopher and anthropologist. Many of his philosophical writings offered a critical analysis of religion. His humanistic theologizing influenced Karl Marx.
Born in Landshut, Bavaria, Feuerbach was the son of the prominent jurist Paul Feuerbach. He abandoned theological studies to study philosophy under the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at Berlin. However, Feuerbach diverged from Hegel’s Idealism.
Feuerbach’s best-known work, Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; translated by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) as The Essence of Christianity, 1854,) claims that religion rises from one’s alienation from oneself and is ‘the dream of the human mind,’ projecting ideal qualities onto a fictitious supreme ‘other.’ Feuerbach contented that the dogmas and beliefs of Christianity are figments of human imagination, fulfilling a need inherent in human nature.
Feuerbach refused to accept that he was an atheist. However, he asserted that the God of Christianity is an illusion. Feuerbach’s materialist philosophies strongly influenced such thinkers as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Charles A. Wilson wrote the study Feuerbach and the Search for Otherness (1989.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
—Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity.
—Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Topics: Religion
The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est – this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world’s History.
—Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Topics: Kindness
If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism—at least in the sense of this work—is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.
—Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Topics: Atheism
I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.
—Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
John Rawls American Philosopher
Friedrich Schleiermacher German Theologian
Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
Karl Marx German Philosopher, Economist
Emanuel Swedenborg Swedish Mystic, Theologian, Scientist
Zeno of Citium Greek Philosopher
Jose Ortega y. Gasset Spanish Philosopher
Hans-Georg Gadamer German Philosopher
Karl Popper Austrian-born British Philosopher
Jeremy Bentham British Philosopher, Economist