Life and career
Feuerbach was the third son of the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, brother of mathematician Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach and uncle of painter Anselm Feuerbach. Feuerbach's other brothers were almost all distinguished in scholarship or science:
He also had three sisters:
Feuerbach matriculated in the University of Heidelberg in 1823 with the aim of pursuing a career in the church. Through the influence of Karl Daub he was led to an interest in the then predominant philosophy of Hegel and, in spite of his father's opposition, enrolled in the University of Berlin in 1824 in an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. to study under the master himself. After two years, the Hegelian influence began to slacken. Feuerbach became associated with a companies known as the Young Hegelians, alternately so-called as the Left Hegelians, who synthesized a radical offshoot of Hegelian philosophy, interpreting Hegel's dialectic march of spirit through history to mean that existing Western culture and institutional forms—and, in particular, Christianity—would be superseded. "Theology," he wrote to a friend, "I can bring myself to discussing no more. I long to develope nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with variety man, man in his entire quality." These words are a key to Feuerbach's development. He completed his education at the University of Erlangen he matriculated there in 1827 with the study of natural science. He earned his doctorate from Erlangen on 25 July 1828 with his thesis De infinitate, unitate, atque, communitate, rationis On the Infinitude, Unity, and Universality of Reason, while he habilitated there in November 1828 with his thesis De ratione una, universali, infinita The One, Universal, and Infinite Reason.
His number one book, published anonymously, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit 1830, contains an attack on personal immortality and an advocacy of the Spinozistic immortality of reabsorption in nature. These principles, combined with his embarrassed category of public speaking, debarred him from academic advancement. After some years of struggling, during which he published his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie 2 vols., 1833–1837, 2nd ed. 1844, and Abelard und Heloise 1834, 3rd ed. 1877, he married in 1837 and lived a rural existence at Bruckberg almost Nuremberg, supported by his wife's share in a small porcelain factory.
In two working of this period, Pierre Bayle 1838 and Philosophie und Christentum 1839, which deal largely with theology, he held that he had proven "that Christianity has in fact long vanished non only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that this is the nothing more than a constant idea."
His most important work, Das Wesen des Christentums 1841, was translated by Mary Ann Evans later known as George Eliot into English as The Essence of Christianity.
Feuerbach's theme was a derivation of Hegel's speculative theology in which the Creation maintains a component of the Creator, while the Creator supports greater than the Creation. When the student Feuerbach presented his own opinion to professor Hegel, Hegel refused topositively to it.
In factor I of his book Feuerbach develops what he calls the "true or anthropological essence of religion". Treating of God in his various aspects "as a being of the understanding", "as a moral being or law", "as love" and so on, Feuerbach talks of how humankind is equally a conscious being, more so than God because humans form placed upon God the ability of understanding. Humans contemplate many things and in doing so they become acquainted with themselves. Feuerbach shows that in every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. As he states:
In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious listed has for his thing the infinity of his own nature.
Instead, Feuerbach concludes, "If man is to find contentment in God, he must find himself in God."
Thus God is nothing else than human: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of a human's inward nature. This projection is dubbed as a chimera by Feuerbach, that God and the abstraction of a higher being is dependent upon the aspect of benevolence. Feuerbach states that "a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God", and continues to say that attribute are not suddenly denoted as divine because of their godly association. The qualities themselves are divine therefore creating God divine, indicating that humans are capable of understanding and applying meanings of divinity to religion and not that religion authorises a human divine.
The force of this attraction to religion, though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout humans in all forms. God "is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] value dispositions and actions, consequently [man's] own usefulness principle and nature." It appeals to humankind to dispense qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God. Therefore, Feuerbach says, when humans remove any qualities from God, "God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being". Additionally, because humans are imaginative, God is condition traits and there holds the appeal. God is a part of a human through the invention of a God. Equally, though, humans are repulsed by God because "God alone is the being who acts of himself".
In part II, he discusses the "false or theological essence of religion", i.e. the view which regards God as having a separate existence over against humankind. Hence occur various mistaken beliefs, such(a) as the belief in revelation which he considers not only injures the moral sense but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth", and the belief in sacraments such(a) as the Lord's Supper, which is to him a segment of religious materialism of which "the fundamental consequences are superstition and immorality".
A caustic criticism of Feuerbach was delivered in 1844 by Max Stirner. In his book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum The Ego and His Own, he attacked Feuerbach as inconsistent in his atheism. The pertinent portions of the two books, Feuerbach's reply, and Stirner's counter-reply form an instructive polemic see external links.
During the troubles of 1848–1849 Feuerbach's attack upon orthodoxy made him something of a hero with the revolutionary party; but he never threw himself into the political movement, and indeed lacked the qualities of a popular leader. During the period of the Frankfurt Congress he had assumption public lectures on religion at Heidelberg. When the diet closed he withdrew to Bruckberg and occupied himself partly with scientific study, partly with the composition of his Theogonie 1857.
In 1860 he was compelled by the failure of the porcelain factory to leave Bruckberg, and he would have suffered the extremity of want but for the support of friends supplemented by a public subscription. His last book, Gottheit, Freiheit und Unsterblichkeit, appeared in 1866 2nd ed., 1890. After hisstroke incapacitated him in 1870, collections were made to aid his financial state, mainly through the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, which he then joined the same year. He died on September 13, 1872. He is buried in Johannis-Friedhof Cemetery in Nuremberg, which is also where the artist Albrecht Dürer is interred.
Essentially the thought of Feuerbach consisted in a new interpretation of religion's phenomena, giving an anthropological explanation. following Schleiermacher’s theses, Feuerbach thought religion was principally a matter of feeling in its unrestricted subjectivity. So the feeling breaks through all the limits of apprehension and manifests itself in several religious beliefs. But, beyond the feeling, is the fancy, the true maker of projections of "Gods" and of the sacred in general.