Scope:
If Kierkegaard was a Christian critic of modernity, Ludwig Feuerbach was one of the major 19th-century critics of Christianity. Unlike Enlightenment critics of religion who attacked religion's supposed irrationality, Feuerbach—followed in this by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — sought to "unmask" the way in which religion prevents us from grappling with the reality of life. Feuerbach reverses Hegel's view of the relationship between God and humanity, arguing that God is a creation, a "projection," of the human imagination by which we attribute to God what are, in fact, crucial aspects of our own humanity. We thus become alienated from our true essence. Feuerbach also thinks, however, that it is precisely
through the development of Christianity that we come to recognize this projection and alienation and, thus, overcome our belief in God and are able to recover our own essence.
Outline
I. With Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, many of the 19th-century thinkers we have discussed in previous lectures tried to show how human beings can affirm religion in the context of modernity. But we also have seen thinkers claiming to defend more traditional forms of religion.
A. Catholic Ultramontanists affirmed traditional Catholicism and rejected most aspects of modern social and political ideology.
B. Protestant fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews rejected modern liberal religion, though they embraced other aspects of modernity.
C. Kierkegaard also rejected many aspects of modern liberal religion and was a strong critic of Christendom, though he was in many other respects not an enemy of modernity.
II. The subject of the next few lectures, as we examine the work of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, FriedrichNietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, is what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion."
A. The hermeneutics of suspicion is an approach to religion that criticizes it not by focusing on questions about the existence of God or the rationality of believing in God but on how religion masks and exacerbates fundamental forms of alienation and suffering.
1. The term "hermeneutics" refers to theories and methods of interpretation. A "hermeneutics of suspicion" is a way of interpreting social and cultural phenomena that attempts to uncover their hidden mechanisms, to show how various aspects of society and culture are not actually what we think they are.
2. Feuerbach thought that in projecting into reality the idea of God, human beings alienated their true being from themselves.
3. Marx thought religion was a form of false consciousness, one of the primary means by which people deluded themselves about a miserable existence of inequality and oppression.
4. Nietzsche thought that religion and morality had their roots in weakness and sickness and were a means by which the most decadent of us wrested and kept power away from the strong and healthy.
5. Freud thought that religion was an effect of repression and the inability of human beings to confront unavoidable psychic conflict and the inevitable gap between our hopes and reality.
B. During the Enlightenment, it was rare to see a straightforward declaration of atheism among leading intellectuals. This remained the case for much of the 19th century, during which time, leading intellectuals were increasingly associated with universities.
1. Enlightenment critics of religion, such as Hume and Voltaire, did not hold academic posts, and in the 19th-century, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Strauss, and Feuerbach lost posts because they were suspected of atheism.
2. Marx and Freud never held academic posts and Nietzsche left his.
III. Feuerbach was the initiator of a form of suspicion that was radicalized by and found its most famous expression in the work of Karl Marx.
A. Feuerbach was a Hegelian but rejected Hegel's idealism for a form of materialism.
1. Reality is ultimately material, and all human life and knowledge begins with our engagement with the world we experience through our senses.
2. Where Hegel begins with spirit projecting itself into the universe and world, Feuerbach begins with human beings projecting the concept of God.
3. What for Hegel are highest realities — self-consciousness, reason, Spirit — are for Feuerbach simply aspects of humanity that we alienate from ourselves: We attribute them to God rather than to ourselves.
4. Feuerbach: "The secret of theology [the study of God] is anthropology."
5. But it is a secret — we don't recognize that this is the case.
B. Although this idea makes Feuerbach an atheist — God is a human creation and does not exist as an independent entity—he also argues that this is a necessary and, ultimately, constructive process.
C. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach shows how this alienation is resolved, and the concept of God overcome, through Christianity.
1. For Feuerbach, as for Hegel, Christianity is the supreme religion, as well as the end of religion, because it is the religion of love: God sacrifices his divine status by becoming human.
2. Recognizing God's love, human beings should also renounce God out of love for humanity; we should renounce the God that requires exclusive faith commitments that separate us from other human beings.
3. In this way, we come to a sense of ourselves.
Suggested Reading:
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianiiy
Smart, Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West.
Questions to Consider:
1. How would you distinguish the hermeneutics of suspicion from Enlightenment questions about religion?
2. Why did Feuerbach think that religion contributed to the development of human beings?
Lecture Eighteen — Transcript
19th-Century Suspicion and Feuerbach
Since talking about Kant in Lecture 8, we've focused on various Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment efforts to show how human beings can affirm religious faith in the context of modernity. But not all the thinkers we've explored in the past 10 lectures have affirmed a modernist view of religion. We've seen Christians and Jews defending what they consider to be a more traditional form of religion.
The most anti-modem thinkers we've seen have been the Catholic Ultramontanists — who affirmed the traditional authorities of Church and tradition and rejected many, if not most, aspects of modern social and political ideology. We've seen Protestant Fundamentalists who were also strong critics of modernity in their defense of biblical authority and in their criticism of modern social movements and 19 century science. But we've also seen that the intellectual foundation of biblical inerrancy and Fundamentalist criticisms of science were themselves based in a distinctly modern epistemology. Orthodox Judaism also exhibits a kind of ambivalence with respect to modernity. While it does emphasize a traditional understanding of Jewish law, many Orthodox thinkers — such as Hirsch — accepted Enlightenment views on reason and morality. They also were not opposed to modern social and political movements in principle, and even accepted a certain degree of assimilation into modern European culture.
Finally, there is Kierkegaard, who also has a complicated relation to modernity. Kierkegaard was, of course, a defender of Christianity and, in certain respects, a traditional form of Christianity — but he thought that modern apologetic efforts to defend Christianity through reason, morality, and history domesticated the Christian God. God, for Kierkegaard, is not reasonable or moral — at least not in any human centered way of thinking about those human capacities. He also was a strong critic of Christendom, of a Christianity so close to modern European culture that the Christian lost all sense of the challenges and trials of faith. Kierkegaard thought genuine Christian faith is much more demanding than Kant, Hegel, or Schleiermacher — and much more uncanny than these thinkers or their liberal heirs imagined.
With this lecture, we enter a new phase of the course and turn to a very different trajectory of thought — one that in many ways will set the agenda for all the lectures that are to follow. We will be exploring the work of thinkers who argue that modern views of reason, ethics, and human autonomy — properly developed — show us why religion is dangerous and destructive. The thinkers we will discuss in developing this line of criticism over the next five lectures are Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Feuerbach is a transitional figure for us. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — arguably the greatest social and cultural critics of the modern period — will introduce us to a mode of thought that I will be calling the "hermeneutics of suspicion."
In this lecture, I will explain this term, and I will then look in some detail at the work of Feuerbach. When Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Hume, or Diderot attacked religion,' their basic strategy was to argue that all religious claims about God, miracles, the soul, or other matters were wrong, or superstitious, or impossible to defend with reason. They would claim, for example, that God did not exist — or at least that there was no good evidence for the existence of God. Some of them offered naturalistic explanations of religion or of the universe. Hobbes and Hume each found the origin of religion in human fear, and Diderot offered a materialist explanation of all that exists.
When we turn, however, to Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, we find a new way of thinking about religion based in a new way of thinking about human life and human consciousness. For these thinkers, the question of religion is not primarily a question of the rationality of religious belief — though each thinker did hold that religious belief is not rational, nor is it a question of the existence of God — although each did hold that there is no God. Rather, these thinkers focused on showing that religion is detrimental to human life and, more importantly, is based in a deep misalignment with life that religious faith hides from us and exacerbates. In other words, religion, for them, is a force of mystification — religious believers are not just wrong or misguided, but rather are deceiving themselves at a very deep level, and so unable to understand what religion really means for human beings.
When I describe this approach to religion by the phrase 'hermeneutics of suspicion," I am borrowing from the important French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who wrote on a wide range of philosophical topics and wrote with especially acute insight on religion in the second half of the 20'" century. Ricoeur described Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — and here I am adding Feuerbach to the list — he described these thinkers as the "masters of suspicion," and he argued that we should think about their work as undertaking what he called a "hermeneutics of suspicion." The term "hermeneutics" refers to theories and methods of interpretation. Thus, for example, we say that proponents of the higher criticism and proponents of biblical inerrancy each have a particular biblical hermeneutics — that is, a systematic, more or less intellectually coherent method of interpreting the Bible. For Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of suspicion is a way of interpreting social and cultural phenomena that attempts to uncover their hidden mechanisms — to show how various aspects of society and culture are not actually what we think they are, but rather are means by which we avoid the realities of life and oppress others and ourselves.
From the perspective of the hermeneutics of suspicion, religion is not just a set of mistaken beliefs about reality, but a symptom of underlying social and psychological causes that lead people to hold onto these beliefs, so that these causes do not see the light of day. The task of such a hermeneutics, therefore, is to uncover or demystify religious illusions on which human beings have depended for so long, so that the underlying causes can be exposed and — at least to some extent — changed. So, to summarize briefly and explain a little bit further, we can say the following about each of the thinkers we' ll be examining in this and subsequent lectures, Feuerbach thought that human beings projected the idea of God into reality, and that in doing so alienated their true being from themselves. He thought that a careful interpretation of the idea of God was the means by which human beings could become reconciled to themselves and achieve full self-consciousness.
Marx took Feuerbach's basic ideas, which included a reversal of Hegel's metaphysics, and refined them into one of the most influential intellectual and social visions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Marx treated religion as a form of false consciousness one of the primary means by which people comforted themselves in the face of a miserable existence that was characterized by deep economic and social inequality. Nietzsche thought that religion and morality had their roots in human weakness and decadence and was the means by which the most decadent of us wrested and kept power away from the strong and healthy. Finally, Freud thought that religion was an effect of psychological repression and the inability of human beings to confront the psychic conflict that comes from the inevitable gap between our most fundamental desires and the harsh
reality of life.
In each of these approaches to religion, we see thinkers radically revising not only our views of what religion is, but rooting it in fundamental aspects of the human condition. From this point of view, it is not enough to simply dismiss religion as a mistake, it is necessary to diagnose religion — to understand it and thus interpret it as a symptom of fundamental conflicts and conditions that human beings cannot face. It is important to keep in mind that the hermeneutics of suspicion can be applied to all cultural and social phenomena, but when applied to religion it is, in general, a form of atheism — though not one that seeks directly to prove that God does not exist or to prove that particular religious doctrines are false. As we' ll see in Ricoeur, very interestingly, the hermeneutics of suspicion can be employed — not as an atheism, but as a kind of theological purification of religion, and I' ll come back to this in a future lecture. But, when we talk about Marx and Freud and also about Feuerbach and Nietzsche — though their cases are a little more complicated — the hermeneutics of suspicion is a form of atheism. So, as we turn to consider these thinkers, I want to make one point about the historical context of the emergence of this form of atheism in the middle of the 19th century.
As I've said, during the Enlightenment it was rare to see a straight forward declaration of atheism among leading intellectuals. Hume employed literary strategies, such as the dialogue form and irony, to avoid making direct criticisms of religion — and, just to be safe, most of his controversial writings were only published posthumously. Even so, he was never able to secure an academic position. Voltaire found himself imprisoned and had to flee France on occasion to avoid further punishment for his radical views. Even Kant, though no atheist, faced censorship when he tried to publish Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, because the book raised questions about Christianity that the German establishment found threatening. As we move into the 19'" century, the social consequences of criticizing religion did become less severe and gradually faded away, but for a while it remained difficult and dangerous for academics to be suspected of atheism or anti-Christian views.
In Germany, the philosopher Fichte lost his post for supposed atheism, and — as we've seen — Strauss's academic career was cut short after he wrote The Life of Jesus.It's not insignificant, then, that the masters of suspicion we treat in these next lectures either never had the chance for an academic career or had their careers cut short. Feuerbach, like Strauss, was forced to give up his academic career, and Marx was never able to get one going — though the fact that he was Jewish also did not help in that respect. Indeed, Marx had to move from Germany, to France, to Brussels, even as a non-academic to escape censorship and ended up living a life of poverty. Nietzsche was an academic superstar and secured a professorship at a very young age, but left academia after about 10 years and wrote his greatest and most critical books as an independent writer. As a medical doctor, Freud's case was different — though by the time he was writing, in the very late 19'" century and well into the 20'" century, things had changed dramatically — and, indeed, what raised eyebrows for readers of Freud was not his clear rejection of religion, but his ideas about sex.
In the remainder of this lecture, I want to address the work of Ludwig Feuerbach. I will describe his debt to, but also his reversal of, Hegel, and I will discuss his claim that the idea of God is a human projection — a result of human beings alienating themselves from their innermost qualities and creating a god out of those qualities. Like many young German intellectuals in the 1830s, Feuerbach began his career as a disciple of Hegel — part of a loosely associated group of thinkers described as "young Hegelians." Generally, during this period, there were two ways of following Hegel. On the one hand, we had conservative Hegelians who tended to see Hegel's work as a justification of the social and cultural status quo in Europe — especially in Germany at the time. Hegel, as we' ve discussed, saw modern European culture and society, including contemporary Christianity, at least Protestant Christianity, as the realization of the development of Spirit. Hegel's grand narrative saw its end, its goal, in 19 -century European culture.
But Feuerbach and others came to interpret Hegel in a more radical even revolutionary — way, as the basis of a form of cultural criticism and politics that would address the inequalities and other problems they saw in their contemporary society — and would thus, through these criticisms and changes, usher in a utopian age. But this way of interpreting Hegel led thinkers such as Feuerbach to depart from the master in crucial ways. Remember the basic elements of Hegel's vision of God and history. He argued that the basic principle of reality was God, or Spirit. Reality takes shape as Spirit empties or alienates or to use a word that we will employ in discussing Feuerbach, "projects" — itself in creating all that is. History proceeds as human beings, in their engagement with the world and with Spirit, come to greater self-consciousness and greater knowledge in a process in which this human self-consciousness is the means by which Spirit comes to self-consciousness. Feuerbach basically adopts the Hegelian view of history as this advance towards self-consciousness.
But where Hegel is an idealist and so begins with Spirit, Feuerbach embraced a metaphysical materialism and so begins with human beings engaging the material world. This is basically a reversal of Hegel. Rather than Spirit emptying itself into the world in the act of cosmic creation, for Feuerbach, human beings project God — human beings create God. For Feuerbach in other words, everything starts with the human engagement with the material world — the world that we experience through our senses and our bodies. He describes a historical process by which human beings, through this engagement, come to better grasp the world and themselves and finally, in the end, come to full self-consciousness. So, in this respect, he is like Hegel—he has this idea of history moving towards human self consciousness. But for Feuerbach, early in this process, human beings produce or project the idea of God — and for Feuerbach, this is the first step in coming to consciousness of themselves, though it takes a long time before human beings come to understand this. Feuerbach puts it like this:
Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. God is not what man is — man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect.... God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely negative, comprehending all negations. But in religion man contemplates his own latent nature. Hence it must be shown that this antithesis, this differencing of God and man, in which religion begins, is a differencing of man with his own nature.
So, this differencing of man from his own nature is, for Feuerbach, the initial moment of history. We can translate this idea of differencing in different ways, depending on what we want to emphasize, and it has been translated in different ways by translators of both Hegel and Feuerbach. We can translate it by projection if we want to emphasize the idea that humans create God in this process. Or, we can translate it by alienation if we want to emphasize that human beings create this God out of essential human attributes, which they then are conscious of only as belonging to God and not to them — that is, we alienate ourselves in creating God. Either way, the point is that we create God, but don't recognize this and believe not only that God is real, but that God created us — and in so doing, we not only misunderstand the nature of reality because we think there' s a God, but we fail to seethe truth about ourselves. Hence, Feuerbach's famous claim that the secret of theology is anthropology — that is, because God is something we have created out of ourselves, from our true nature, theological claims about God are really anthropological claims about ourselves. So, what for Hegel is the origin and ultimate principle of reality — self-consciousness, reason, Spirit — are, for Feuerbach, attributes of the human — they come from, they do not create, the human. Feuerbach again:
The historical progress of religion consists in this, that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognizedas subjective;thatis,whatwasformerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human.
So, from one perspective, we can say rather simply that this makes Feuerbach an atheist: God is not real but a human idea given reality and substance out of a misunderstanding of reality and of ourselves. But, we need to complicate this claim, and in so doing make the fundamental move that other masters of suspicion — Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud — also make, because, for Feuerbach, it is not enough to simply say that God does not exist, that we've made a mistake. Rather, we need to understand why this false idea has had such a hold on humanity. We have to understand where this idea came from, and we have to understand how it functions. We already have some initial answers to this question: The idea of God comes from us, and it alienates us from our own natures.
But Feuerbach claims more than this, for he also wants to argue that this process of projection and alienation, and the further process of our coming to self-consciousness of this process, plays an absolutely crucial role in the development of humanity. Here, we also see how Feuerbach is different from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, for he' ll argue that this concept of God ultimately has played a constructive not a destructive — role in human history, however false on one level. In the end, this has been, for Feuerbach, a necessary mistake. This is Feuerbach's basic interpretive method in his major work on religion, The Essence of Christianity, which was published in 1841. There, Feuerbach tries to show how theological ideas such as God, faith, and Christian doctrines, such as Incarnation and Trinity, tell us something important about ourselves.
But to understand what they tell us, we need to consider for a moment one of the key concepts in Feuerbach: consciousness. Despite his materialism, Feuerbach claims that self-consciousness is what makes humans human — it separates them from all other forms of life. However, self-consciousness for Feuerbach is not simply a matter of one's awareness of one's self as a feeling, thinking, and acting being, but rather it is only fully present in a being for whom the being and nature of his or her species — what Feuerbach calls "species being" — is an object of thought. Here, Feuerbach is indebted to Hegel for the idea that self-consciousness comes not so much directly from our engagement with objects in the world and with myself as a particular person, but rather only in the recognition of myself as a part of social reality. Self- consciousness, in other words, is social — it emerges between people and involves awareness of myself as a social being, as a being related to others and like others in many respects. In this sense, for Feuerbach, we are always dual beings: Our sense of self is always constituted by an I and a Thou — or, more generally, by consciousness of myself in relation to others, to humanity as a whole.
Religion, argues Feuerbach, is this form of self-consciousness of the species in its primitive form, and the history of religion is the history of the development of this self-consciousness. So, Feuerbach writes: "The necessary turning-point of history is therefore the open confession that the consciousness of God is nothing else than the consciousness of the species." For Feuerbach, then, when we project God, we are projecting a primitive sense of our species, but also alienating ourselves from it. This does mean that we relate to this projection, to God, as another person, and we idealize this relationship. God is an especially powerful being — a protector or father figure to whom we attach all our wishes and all our fears. In this earliest stage of religion, our conception of God is largely based on emotional attachment. However, this conception of God changes through history as human beings and human thinking become more sophisticated and humans begin to reflect on their relation to God.
Feuerbach again:
But when religion advances in years, and, with years, in understanding; when within the bosom of religion, reflection on religion is awakened, and the consciousness of the identity of the divine being with the human begins to dawn,— in a word, when religion becomes theology, the originally involuntary and harmless separation of God from man becomes an intentional, excogitated separation, which has no other object than to banish again from consciousness this identity which has already entered there.
In other words, as human beings begin to theologize, they begin to sense the identity of the human and the divine, but they resist this knowledge. One consequence of this is that they begin to see God less and less in anthropocentric terms and more and more in abstract intellectual and moral terms. In doing so, they begin to make God more and more perfect — think here of the difference, for example, between the Greek gods as represented by Homer in the iliad and Odyssey — gods who are jealous, petty, in constant conflict with one another — and contrast this to the God of the New Testament or the Qur'an — a single, perfect God much more distant from everyday human behavior. But as this process gets going, the original unity with gods or God who meet our emotional needs is disrupted, the original projection becomes more alienating because the more perfect we make God, the less perfect we make ourselves, and the less self-affirming this projection becomes. In religious terms, God becomes more holy, and we become more sinful. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, then, we see a God that is once loving and personal and also omnipotent and punishing. Eventually, so Feuerbach claims, this tension comes to a breaking point — which, for him, is first glimpsed in the Christian story of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
For Feuerbach, as for Hegel, Christianity is the supreme religion because it is the religion of love, and love is the key to species being it is the essence of the human relationship. Despite the fact that God is judge and master, for Christianity, God's love remains the most important divine characteristic. What is the most loving thing God can do? God can sacrifice himself for the sake of love — that is, God can renounce his divine status by becoming human —atonce an act of love and the beginning of a process, for Feuerbach, by which human beings come to understand that God is them. He writes:
The clearest, most irrefragable [unquestionable] proof that man in religion contemplates himself as the object of the Divine Being, as the end of the divine activity, that thus in religion he has relation only to his own nature, only to himself,— the clearest, most irrefragable proof of this is the love of God to man, the basis and central point of religion. God, for the sake of man, empties himself of his Godhead, lays aside his Godhead. Herein lies the elevating influence of the Incarnation; the highest, the perfect being humiliates, lowers himself for the sake of man.
In this sense, Christianity, with the idea of incarnation, is not only the supreme religion, but it is also the end of religion — but it is the end of religion in a dual sense. On the one hand, it is the end of religion in the sense that with Christianity, or at least with Christianity properly understood, with Feuerbach then, the recognition of God's love means overcoming the idea of God as a separate being in control of human destiny. Following God now means that human beings should renounce God, for following God really means following the law of love and rejecting anything — such as gods who demand exclusive allegiance — that separates us from our fellow human beings. That is, we come to see, as we work out these conflicting ideas of God that develop over time, that love unites while religious faith separates. In this way, we come to a sense of ourselves as part of the larger human community through the development of the religious idea of love that has as its end atheism. But, on the other hand and somewhat paradoxically, we get at atheism not in spite of, but through, religion, so that Christianity is also the end of religion in the sense that it is the goal of religion what Feuerbach describes as an "atheistic religion of humanity." By this I mean, unlike many other atheists, Feuerbach does not see atheism as a contradiction of religion and as threatening to render meaningless the love and morality that had been supported by religion. For him, atheism is simply the recuperation of those human attributes that had been lost in the worship of God. Thus, near the end of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach can affirm, with the Christian tradition, that we are all one in Christ. He writes:
A loving heart is the heart of the species throbbing in the individual. Thus Christ, as the consciousness of love, is the consciousness of the species. We are all one in Christ. Christ is the consciousness of our identity. He therefore who loves man for the sake of man, who rises to the love of the species, to universal love, adequate to the nature of the species, he is a Christian, is Christ himself.... Thus, where there arises the consciousness of the species as a species, the idea of humanity as a whole, Christ disappears, without, however, his true nature disappearing; for he was the substitute for the consciousness of the species, the image under which it was made present to the people, and became the law of popular life.
Feuerbach makes a crucial move for the development of the hermeneutics of suspicion — a move that will emerge with full force in Marx, who was deeply influenced by Feuerbach. Feuerbach, that is, does not only tell us that God is an illusion, but that God is a significant illusion — an illusion with meaning, an illusion that has to be interpreted, not simply dismissed as irrational. Reading, interpreting, applying a hermeneutics to this illusion, Feuerbach shows us what he thinks is the true meaning of religion and the true meaning of humanity. Yet, Feuerbach differs from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in that ultimately, as we've just seen, he sees the illusion of God as a positive thing — as the means by which human beings, as he puts it in the last quote I read, come to the consciousness of their species being. In this sense, it is a necessary illusion. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, however, will be much more critical of religion — their hermeneutics of suspicion much more suspicious.
