Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach (engraving by August Weger )

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (* July 28, 1804 in Landshut ; † September 13, 1872 in Rechenberg near Nuremberg ) was a German philosopher and anthropologist whose criticism of religion and idealism had a significant influence on the Vormärz movement and formulated a point of view that was useful for the modern human sciences , such as psychology and ethnology , has become fundamental.

Life

Origin, family

Ludwig Feuerbach's father was the legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach (1775–1833, ennobled 1808) from Frankfurt am Main , who is considered one of the most important lawyers of recent times in Germany and in particular as the founder of modern German criminal law. A few weeks before Ludwig was born, he took over a chair at the Bavarian State University in Landshut . In 1806 he was appointed to the government in Munich to modernize criminal law . In the same year he achieved the abolition of torture in Bavaria , and in 1813 the Bavarian penal code that he had drawn up came into force. After an interlude in Bamberg, he was President of the Ansbach Court of Appeal from 1817 until his death in 1833 , where he also dealt with the Kaspar Hauser case .

Ludwig's mother, b. Eva Wilhelmine Tröster (* 1774 in Dornburg / Saale , † 1852 in Nuremberg) came from a modest background, but had noble ancestors: her paternal grandfather was an illegitimate son of Ernst August I, Duke of Saxe-Weimar , so she was one Second cousin of Grand Duke Carl August , Goethe's friend and supporter. She had only attended one village school, but was interested in many things, including the work of her son Ludwig, whose criticism of religion she shared. According to the testimony of a younger relative, she was “a winning figure into old age, of rare kindness and gentleness”.

The five sons and three daughters of the criminal lawyer showed a variety of talents: Anselm (1798–1851, father of the painter Anselm Feuerbach ) was often musically gifted and became known with the work The Vatican Apollo ; Karl (1800–1834) did his doctorate at the age of 22 with a mathematical discovery (he was the first to describe the Feuerbach circle named after him ); Eduard (1803–1843) had the skills to become a natural scientist, but for the sake of his father turned to law, which he taught at the age of 24, first in Munich, then in Erlangen ; Friedrich (1806–1880) studied Indology and Sanskrit with Friedrich Rückert , Christian Lassen and August Wilhelm Schlegel ; he also emerged as a translator and author. The three sisters are known to have a musical talent. Helene wrote and composed; after an unsteady life that had led her to England and France, she lived in Italy until her death. The two younger ones, Leonore and Elise, remained unmarried with their mother.

All of Ludwig's brothers were involved in the student fraternity movement , which in the first time after the liberation wars was the only reasonably targeted opposition to the Restoration . Anselm and Eduard presumably belonged, Karl has proven, to the secret youth league , whose aims included a republican constitution and civil liberties in a united Germany. The young Ludwig Feuerbach also shows sympathy for the student movement; there is no evidence of active participation.

Childhood, youth, studies

Special stamp for the 200th birthday in 2004

As a two-year-old Ludwig Feuerbach came to Munich, where he later attended elementary school. His father’s friendships meant that many of the great minds of Munich at the time were in contact with the family, including the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the two innovators of the Bavarian school system, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer and Friedrich Thiersch . After the criminal lawyer was transferred to Bamberg, Ludwig attended the upper primary school there. In 1816 the parents separated for several years. The brothers Friedrich, Ludwig and Eduard moved with their father to Ansbach, the three sisters stayed with their mother in Bamberg for the time being.

After Ludwig Feuerbach had already dealt intensively with theology while still at high school in Ansbach and had even taken Hebrew lessons from the local rabbi, he began studying Protestant theology in Heidelberg in 1823. He felt strongly repelled by the rationalistic theology taught in Heidelberg by Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus , but Carl Daub , who was a friend of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , drew his attention to philosophy. In 1824 he went to Berlin, where, against his father's opposition, he changed subjects: for two years he attended all of the lectures that Hegel gave during this period, including logic twice. Since he had to complete his studies at a state university as a scholarship holder of the Bavarian king, he returned to Bavaria in 1826. After a year of private studies in philology , literature and history, he studied botany, anatomy and physiology in Erlangen and at the same time wrote his dissertation with the title: On the infinity, unity and generality of reason . In June 1828 he received his doctorate in philosophy; at the end of the same year the habilitation followed. A few weeks later, he began teaching as an unpaid private lecturer in Erlangen.

Erlangen, Bruckberg, the first plants

Feuerbach built his academic career with the anonymous first book Thoughts on Death and Immortality . It appeared in 1830 shortly after the outbreak of the unrest that shook the whole of Germany for two years in the wake of the July Revolution in Paris and culminated in the Hambach Festival . Because of its religiously critical content, the script was immediately banned and the author was investigated by the police. In the spring of 1832, Feuerbach suddenly broke off his lectures.

In search of alternatives, he wrote the collection of aphorisms Abälard and Héloïse or The Writer and Man as well as the history of modern philosophy from Bacon from Verulam to Benedict Spinoza . The latter earned him the invitation of the Hegelian “Society for Scientific Criticism” to collaborate on their “yearbooks”. Two of the submitted contributions caused a sensation: One attacked the conservative constitutional lawyer Friedrich Julius Stahl, an outstanding theoretician of the restoration . The other, prompted by a polemic by the Kantian C. Fr. Bachmann against the Hegel School, became the justification of idealistic philosophy in general. Because the essay was only accepted in excerpts from the “Jahrbuch” due to its length, Feuerbach published it as an independent work under the title “ Critique of the Anti-Hegel”. An introduction to the study of philosophy .

In the winter semester of 1835/36, Feuerbach once again gave lectures in Erlangen, then he finally said goodbye to university teaching. In rural Bruckberg near Ansbach he had found the place that was beneficial for him. His lover Bertha Löw, who became his wife in 1837, was the co-owner of a porcelain factory there, which was housed in the former margravial hunting lodge. The small factory made only modest profits, but offered free housing and extensive use of natural resources . In 1839 the first daughter "Lorchen" was born, in 1842 the second, but she died very early. The simple, but generally carefree life in the country corresponded to Feuerbach's personal taste, and the complete freedom from all academic considerations became, as he himself admitted, the " Archimedean point " in his philosophical development.

In Bruckberg, Feuerbach initially carried out extensive natural history studies and wrote a second volume , devoted exclusively to Leibniz and his monad theory, to his history of modern philosophy.

The epoch-making criticism of religion

A shift in attention brought Arnold Ruge's invitation to collaborate on the Hallische Jahrbücher , the journalistic collection pool of the Young Hegelians that appeared from January 1, 1838 : the newspaper offered Feuerbach a welcome forum to intervene in the intellectual and ideological disputes of the Restoration period. He did so with a number of reviews and essays, some of which are among his most important writings, such as On the Critique of 'Positive Philosophy' (1838) and On the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (1839). He wanted to participate in the debate about the Cologne bishops' dispute with a comprehensive statement. When the censorship banned the reprint in the Hallische Jahrbucher after two episodes, he published them as a whole as a separate work under the title On Philosophy and Christianity in Relation to the Hegelian philosophy of being un-Christian . At the same time he wrote a monograph on the founder of the French Enlightenment, Pierre Bayle , which became a personal confession book (1839).

The fierce polemics against the “Christian delicacy” of the Restoration, which was criticized as backward-looking and dishonest, prompted him to get to the bottom of the phenomenon of religion. For two years, from 1839 to 1841, he worked on the main work Das Wesen des Christianentums . The book was published in the spring of 1841 by Verlag Otto Wigand in Leipzig and made Feuerbach suddenly famous. In the same year six more polemics and articles were written; they first appeared in the Halle yearbooks and, when these were renamed for censorship reasons and moved to Dresden, in the successor organ, German yearbooks for science and art . For the most part, they are explanations of his criticism of religion and responses to criticisms of the essence of Christianity that have since appeared . In Judging the Scriptures: The Essence of Christianity it is already clear that Feuerbach broke away from Hegel while working on his main work.

In the Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy , written in early 1842 but not published until autumn 1843 due to the prohibition by the censorship , Feuerbach first developed his now famous critique of speculative-idealistic philosophy . In the following winter half year he worked this criticism systematically into principles of the philosophy of the future . Afterwards he concentrated again on the continuation of the criticism of religion: in the summer of 1843 he had dealt intensively with Luther and then wrote The Essence of Faith in Luther's sense , where he used quotations to show that his view of Christianity was already based on the great Reformer be. For two years he then worked on a book that was less than eighty pages long in its first version: The Essence of Religion . In it, religious criticism and ideological materialism flow together for the first time.

Since the appearance of the essence of Christianity , Feuerbach's private life has also been much more eventful than before. He went on trips more often: in the summer he regularly spent a few weeks with Christian Kapp in Heidelberg. The well-known love affair with daughter Johanna Kapp unfolded in the house of this friend: at the age of sixteen she fell so violently in love with Feuerbach that she turned away all aspirants for life, including August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Gottfried Keller (love was mutual, Feuerbach "cleared up." “The affair was not final until 1846). Several lifelong friendships developed in Heidelberg, for example with Georg Herwegh , Friedrich Kapp and Jakob Moleschott . In the summer of 1845, Feuerbach traveled from Heidelberg to Switzerland, then to Cologne and Westphalia. He was also in Nuremberg more often, where his mother, two sisters and the youngest brother Friedrich were now living. It was here in 1842 that the friendship began with Theodor Cramer , the later industrial magnate Cramer-Klett, who established himself as a publisher in Nuremberg at that time. In Bruckberg he was visited for the first time by Hermann Kriege , who worked for some time with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and, although much younger, played an essential role in Feuerbach's politicization.

Through his criticism of religion and idealism, which was perceived as liberating in broad circles, Feuerbach became the intellectual leading figure of the dissident movements of the “ Vormärz ”. From 1842 he received a number of offers to collaborate in newspapers and magazines of the opposition spectrum (including the " Rheinische Zeitung "). He didn't notice any; He also rejected Karl Marx in 1843 when he wanted to win him over to the (very short-lived) German-French yearbooks that appeared in Paris . Marx, however, left The Essence of Faith in Luther's sense in the Paris Forward! print. Through reading and acquaintance with a craftsperson, Feuerbach himself discovered the early communist movement , which inspired him.

In 1845, Feuerbach received an offer from his publisher Otto Wigand to collect his writings in a work edition. By 1866 all of these works had reached ten volumes. The first appeared in 1846; Feuerbach revised all of his books from the 1930s in order to take account of the turning away from Hegelian philosophy that had meanwhile been completed. He also subjected the essence of Christianity , which has now appeared in its second edition, to a further revision.

Paulskirchen-Parlament, Heidelberg lectures

After the outbreak of the March Revolution in 1848, Feuerbach was asked from several sides to run for the Frankfurt National Assembly . Although he was barely defeated by a local lawyer when the candidates were drawn up, he still went to Frankfurt as an observer, also because he believed he had to build a new existence for himself: Since the Bruckberger porcelain factory was temporarily insolvent, his wife lost her income and the couple was threatened with complete loss Destitution. In Frankfurt, Feuerbach was in close contact with the faction of the radical democratic left. In addition to the existing friendships with Christian and Friedrich Kapp, important new contacts were made here: Ludwig Bamberger , Julius Fröbel , Otto Lüning and Carl Vogt . Feuerbach recognized very early the hopelessness of parliamentary efforts; even in extra-parliamentary associations such as the Democratic Congress , of which he was a registered member, he had little hope. In the fall of 1848 a student delegation invited him to lectures in Heidelberg. Since the university refused the auditorium, Feuerbach read in the town hall. A good third of his audience, around 250 people, consisted of students (including Gottfried Keller , who was “converted” by Feuerbach and processed the experience in the Green Heinrich ), the rest of citizens, craftsmen and workers. For the lectures, Feuerbach developed the essence of religion , published in 1846, into thirty lectures, which appeared in print form in 1851 as the eighth volume of the total works .

Decade of response

Photograph by Ludwig Feuerbach (around 1866)

In the spring of 1849, Feuerbach retired to Bruckberg, from where he followed the final collapse of the revolution in Europe with bitterness. For a while, the reaction spurred his spirit of resistance. He wrote to a friend in 1851 that she had "doubled my diligence, concentrated my mind, and promoted my biliary secretion".

For several years there seemed to have been such a lively coming and going of friends, like-minded people and admirers in Bruckberg Castle that it caught the attention of the authorities. According to a police report, Bruckberg is a “fatal focus of democracy and irreligiosity”, and it is assumed that “political criminals find acceptance and concealment” there. A police station was specially set up in the village in order to be able to better monitor the residents of the porcelain factory. Of course, there was no evidence of the lively company in the castle more than land in places in the immediate vicinity.

For a while, Feuerbach also toyed with the idea of ​​emigrating to the USA, but the plans failed because of the lack of money. In 1850 he managed to publish two ironic articles against the victorious reaction ; the second, a review of Moleschott's doctrine of food for the people , was made famous by a casual play on words: “Man is what he eats.” In addition to a two-volume edition of his father's papers, he worked on learned theogony for many years the Sources of Classical, Hebrew, and Christian Antiquity , published in 1857. But neither of the works found any response. After the reaction had thoroughly stifled every spark of political emancipation, Feuerbach's philosophy also disappeared completely from public interest; general defeatism helped the hitherto almost unknown Schopenhauer philosophy to rise rapidly. Feuerbach, on the other hand, was even pronounced dead in a newspaper report in 1856. In France, England and the United States, however, where translations of The Essence of Christianity had appeared, he was beginning to become known.

Rechenberg, retirement work

Manor house in Rechenberg (Nuremberg) , Feuerbach's residence from 1859 to 1872

In 1859 the Bruckberg porcelain factory was finally bankrupt. Feuerbach and his wife not only lost all the savings they had invested, but also their right of residence and the use of natural resources. After a painstaking search, a house designed as a summer residence was found on the Rechenberg (now part of Nuremberg) , on which a small village had developed that at that time was still at the gates of Nuremberg. Friends from the forty-eight revolutionary era paid for the move and collected donations that were so plentiful that after a while, Feuerbach himself asked to stop the collection. From 1862 onwards, he received a regularly renewed gift of honor from the Schiller Foundation that had just been created , as well as two annuities: one from Ludwig Bamberger, who had risen to become an influential banker in French exile, the other from the Nuremberg industrial magnate Theodor von Cramer-Klett . Visitors were also more frequent again. Since the exiles were allowed to re-enter with the dawn of the " New Era " in 1858, Friedrich Kapp, Carl Vogt, Georg Herwegh, Ludwig Pfau and others came to Rechenberg. The house certainly did not offer the tranquility and idyll of Bruckberg. Feuerbach suffered severely from the loss of his “seat of the muse” and did not find his way back to work. Nonetheless, he wrung himself out a number of shorter texts, including the important treatise On Spiritualism and Materialism, especially in relation to Free Will .

The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 shook Feuerbach deeply. Unlike before, he now followed political events with keen attention. He resolutely rejected Bismarck's unification policy because it was based on violence and, in his view, did not bring freedom; however, he studied the first volume of Marx's Capital shortly after its publication and was enthusiastic about the women's movement that was emerging in America. In 1867 he suffered a minor stroke , from which he recovered in the Austrian Salzkammergut, invited by the free-spirited mountain farmer Konrad Deubler . In the spring and early summer of 1868 he started a new book on morality and free will, but stopped working on it in the summer. On July 20, 1870 - the day before the Franco-Prussian War had been declared - he suffered a second, severe stroke, which completely destroyed his intellectual faculties. Feuerbach lived a little more than two years with only very limited contact. On September 13, 1872, he died of pneumonia.

Feuerbach's grave in the Johannisfriedhof in Nuremberg

1869 Feuerbach was in the recently by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel founded Social Democratic Labor Party (SDAP) occurred. Around the turn of the year 1871/72, a newspaper close to the party called for money to be raised for the allegedly impoverished philosopher. Numerous other newspapers took up the call. A few weeks later, the high-circulation family magazine Die Gartenlaube also called for a "national thanks" at the end of a double-page article about Feuerbach. The donations were so plentiful that the wife and daughter, for whose future Feuerbach had feared, were guaranteed a modest but lifelong livelihood. According to newspaper reports, a “conspicuous” crowd took part in the funeral at the Nuremberg Johannisfriedhof : In addition to numerous civic associations, the Nuremberg section of the SDAP also called for a mass rally. Theodor von Cramer-Klett donated the tomb.

Main moments of Feuerbach's philosophy

Feuerbach's philosophy is also always the fruit of intensive examination of the prevailing intellectual currents. He never tried to develop a philosophical system; later he even rejected such systems outright. His critical spirit did not spare his own views either, which among other things led to his turning away from the originally represented philosophy of German idealism towards the end of the 1930s and developing a point of view that was diametrically opposed to it. This turning point makes it difficult to treat Feuerbach's philosophy “in a longitudinal section”, that is, fanned out according to individual topics; The chronology must always be taken into account in the presentation.

Initial trust in common sense

As a student and admirer of Hegel, Feuerbach acknowledged his master in the first years of his work. In the Erlangen lectureship 1829–32 he taught Hegel's philosophy as the “organ of philosophy itself”, and in 1835 he publicly defended Hegel (in the criticism of “Anti-Hegel” ). However, his philosophy not only inspired him as a grandiose intellectual achievement. For him, she also realized an ideal of humanity that inspired the later Enlightenment as a whole: by building this philosophy exclusively on reason, in which all people participate, it created something that unites humanity. Feuerbach wrote: "Thinking I am connected, or rather: I am one with everyone, I myself am almost all people". Or, based on the I think, therefore I am from Descartes: “I think, therefore I am all people”. His confidence at the beginning of his philosophical career was based on the conviction that this "one, general, infinite reason" (the title of the habilitation thesis) enables the ultimate philosophical knowledge of truth and allows all reality to be grasped conceptually. That is why the primacy of the spiritual was unquestionable for him for a long time, and he explicitly acknowledged idealism: real truth only belongs to the "ideal", the spiritual. To justify himself, he repeatedly cited the example of the Copernican view of the world : The “material” (the rising and setting of the sun) is deceptive, the “spiritual” (knowledge gained through theory) is true.

Feuerbach's philosophical partisanship, however, also had a historical component: Hegel's purely rational building of thought was the progressive counterpoint to the Catholic Romanticism, which increasingly followed the political backward movement of the Metternich restoration (clearly in the polemic against FJ Stahl, The Philosophy of Law According to Historical View ... , more sharply in On the Critique of 'Positive Philosophy' ).

Philosophy historiography

Feuerbach initially created new things in the field of the history of philosophy. Here he went beyond Hegel and did pioneering work in that he did not, unlike Hegel, understand the philosophical systems as mere moments in the dialectical self-discovery of the mind, but ascribed to them their own validity and necessity. His method of “development”, which asks about the positive, the “true meaning” of philosophical systems, is hermeneutical in the modern sense . The two works History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon from Verulam to Benedict Spinoza (1833) and Presentation, Development and Critique of Leibniz's Philosophy (1837), as well as the cycle of lectures on the history of modern philosophy held in Erlangen in 1835/36, count among them the most important works of Feuerbach.

Mind and nature

In retrospect, Feuerbach said that in the works of the thirties he had expressed his own thoughts “under foreign names”. In fact, a main motif emerges very clearly through the work on the history of philosophy, namely the ambiguous position of nature in occidental philosophy since Descartes . The way in which the philosophers of the modern age encountered nature and arranged it in their systems of thought, he felt as dualistic, as a violent break: Because with them the spirit is always the actual being, i.e. the primary, the matter, on the other hand, is only secondary, improper being, nature is devalued. This dualism begins with Descartes, for whom matter was only the “expanded”, and extends - albeit in a more subtle form - to Hegel. This disregard for nature stands in the way of Feuerbach's personal and aesthetic experience: he experiences it as overwhelming “glory”; it has its own “quality”, indeed authority, to which thinking has to respond .

This main motif has already emerged in many ways in the history of modern philosophy : unlike in the Hegel school, Feuerbach had the philosophy of the modern age begin not with Descartes but with Francis Bacon ; he justified this with the fact that Bacon had raised the systematically collected empirical knowledge, ie the natural sciences, to the "basis of all knowledge". He repeatedly emphasized the importance of the study of nature for the development of philosophical knowledge, and the entire second part of the book is an interpretation of the history of philosophy in the sense of a progressive speculative realization of the unity of spirit and nature. After completing the work, Feuerbach dealt intensively with the Italian natural philosophers of the Renaissance , especially with Giordano Bruno , with whose emphatic enthusiasm for nature he identified himself. Spinoza's pantheism (mind and nature are manifestations of the one, divine substance ) was a philosophical position for him, behind which one could not go back.

In the monograph on Leibniz, Feuerbach took a path that already deviated from Hegel in order to establish the unity of spirit and nature: Based on Leibniz's monad theory , material reality, i.e. nature, as the "alter ego" of spirit, becomes its equal, He also took a challenging counterpart. It receives its own right that is not tied to speculative recording. This approach was of course still based on the classical-philosophical speculation of terms . Feuerbach therefore did not pursue it any further and later expressly criticized it.

Criticism of religion enlightening

During his studies in Berlin, Feuerbach had personally alienated himself from the traditional Protestant faith. Already in the first publicly distributed, but anonymously published, work Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), he rejected the belief in immortality as hostile to life: To wish an afterlife would contradict the functioning of nature, in which everything, including death, " true, whole, undivided complete ”be:“ Death is therefore the whole, the complete dissolution of your whole and complete being. ”Above all, one arrives at the undivided affirmation of life only through the undivided affirmation of death. In this first scripture he also decidedly rejected belief in a personal God. This belief is selfish, because the person God is for the believer only "guarantee of himself and his own existence". Feuerbach openly acknowledged the pantheism to which most of the thinkers and poets of the Late Enlightenment and Weimar Classicism secretly adhered in Spinoza's entourage. The hearty satirical Xenien in the second part of the book document the turning away from traditional and ecclesiastical piety.

On the subject of religion, Feuerbach noted early on a dissent with his teacher: Hegel had insisted on a fundamental agreement between philosophy and Christian faith. Feuerbach was of the opposite opinion, but he criticized Hegel's view in his early work only implicitly, for example in the introduction to the history of modern philosophy , where he did not see the historical development, like Hegel, as a "gradual progression of the spirit", but on a sharp contrast between Christianity and the "thinking spirit" let go: the spirit (like art, by the way) had to free itself from the "oppressive rule" of religion. It became clearer in the essay against Friedrich Julius Stahl, where - to the alienation of many Hegelians too - he radically denied any commonality between religion and secular institutions such as law ; the two areas are essentially alien to one another, indeed opposite.

It was only when he finally turned his back on university philosophy and established himself as a freelance writer in rural Bruckberg (1837) that Feuerbach made criticism of religion his main theme. In the last chapter of the Leibniz monograph, and especially in the monograph on the founder of the French Enlightenment, Pierre Bayle, he expressed with a directness unheard of for the German conditions at the time, what the French Enlightenment had more or less openly advocated in the 18th century : The religious belief has outlived itself, it is unworthy of the "thinking man". Unlike many enlighteners, however, Feuerbach did not attribute religious belief to ecclesiastical tutelage (“priest fraud”) or, like Immanuel Kant , to the reluctance to use one's own understanding. Rather, he worked out two opposing attitudes: on the one hand the “spirit of theology”, which is caught up in dogmas and defends against the objections of reason, and on the other hand the “spirit of science”, which is the only reason and the law in nature Cognitive authority recognizes. In modern times, however, reason and science have come to such irrefutable results that it becomes a question of intellectual honesty whether one still clings to religious dogmas; For Feuerbach, faith had lost its former innocence and justification; for him it became "hypocrisy" in front of himself and the world around him.

This argument had a historical-social thrust, it was directed against the restorative-religious tendencies of the time, which Feuerbach had already declared war on in the polemic against Friedrich Julius Stahl . This is borne out by two other writings that were written around the same time as the Bayle monograph, but were intended as contributions to current debates for a daily newspaper (the “Hallische Jahrbücher”): On the Critique of 'Positive Philosophy' and On Philosophy and Christianity in Relation to the reproach of non-Christianity made in Hegelian philosophy . In some harsh polemics, Feuerbach sharpened the argument of the incompatible points of view: When conservative philosophers and politicians demanded that philosophy should be aligned with Christianity, he countered with vehement rejection of any mediation between religion and philosophy. In philosophy there can be no more or less Christianity, philosophy has as little to do with Christianity as mathematics, for example.

Criticism of religion "critical-genetic"

Feuerbach overcame this enlightening, polemical, basically negative critique of religion when he encountered religion as a “spiritual natural scientist” in his famous main work Das Wesen des Christianentums (1841) and thus took it seriously as a human phenomenon. Instead of forcing them into the Procrustean bed of a philosophical system , as Hegel did, he first allowed them to apply in their peculiarity (the "understanding" first part of the book is twice as long as the "critical" second part). In the preface to the second edition he wrote: “But I let religion express itself; I only make their listener and interpreter, not their prompter. Not to invent - to discover, 'to reveal existence' was my only purpose. "

Feuerbach thus came to an explanation that is human-scientific in the modern sense: religion is not simply “nonsense” or “superstition”, it is the pictorial expression of properties and impulses, of “forces” that humans consider so important and essential feels that for him they make up his “being”, his real human being: Religion is “identical ... with man's awareness of his being ”. These forces do not appear to him as individually limited, but rather as going beyond the individual: "Will, love or heart are not forces that a person has ", they are "the elements that inspire, determine, and dominate him, which he does not oppose can ". And because man perceives these powers or abilities as going beyond his individual limitations, he hypostatizes and absolutizes them, he sets them “outside of himself” and worships them “as another, different, own being”.

This understanding of belief in God ultimately allows the anthropological interpretation of religion: “Religion is the reflection, the reflection of the human being in oneself.” - “God is the mirror of man.” - “God is the revealed inner being, the expressed Even of man. ”The religious beliefs convey a message, they provide information about the“ essence ”of man: God is for man the“ family record in which he enters the names of the most dear, holiest beings ”. In twelve chapters of the essence of Christianity , Feuerbach tried to interpret the most important “secrets” of the Christian faith one after the other by peeling out their anthropological content: When religion says that God loves man, it means: “The highest is the love of People". Or: "The mystery of the suffering God" means: "Suffering for others is divine". And that God feels means: "The feeling is divine being".

It is noteworthy that Feuerbach always found the “heart” or “mind” behind the “secrets” of faith, using both words synonymously and in pairs; Terms such as “sensation”, “feeling”, “fantasy” are often added as a supplement. Feuerbach was obviously looking at something for which there was no adequate term at the time (“soul” and “spirit” were religious or philosophical), and what we now call psyche : the interplay of the partly conscious , partly unconscious impulses and sensations and ideas that determine the affective- emotional behavior and largely also the perception in humans .

Many attempts have been made to explain Feuerbach's criticism of religion with the term projection , which Feuerbach himself never used. In fact, the expression hides an important aspect of Feuerbach's intention: for him it was not just about the determination of psychological failures , but positively about exposing the content hidden under the religious images.

Feuerbach wanted to expose this content in order to make it usable for human coexistence. So its interpretation was based on a therapeutic intention. He said in the foreword to the first volume of all of his works , "he made the investigation and healing of head and heart diseases of mankind his task".

Critique of Speculative Philosophy

Feuerbach's second famous critical achievement is directly related - also biographically - to anthropologically oriented criticism of religion: the criticism of Hegel and speculative philosophy as a whole. A few months after the appearance of the essence of Christianity , in Preliminary Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy (the allusion to Luther is deliberate), he also applied the procedure applied to religion to the philosophy of the absolute by interpreting it anthropologically: Behind the “absolute Spirit “Hegel stuck the Christian image of God. A year later he explained his criticism in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future .

Feuerbach did not criticize Hegel's philosophy with individual conceptions or conclusions, but with the foundation on which it stands: the identity between thinking and being, i.e. H. the basic assumption that the logical-conceptual thinking of the philosopher represents the world correctly and is ultimately nothing other than the “self-development of the world spirit”. Feuerbach now rejected this identity, which he previously affirmed, as “rational theology”: “The identity of thinking and being is therefore only the expression of the deity of reason - the expression of the fact that […] reason is everything, as in strict theology, God is everything. "

However, this criticism is not only negative, it had, just like his criticism of religion, a positive direction: Feuerbach was concerned with the recognition of something essential that the Hegelian philosophy, like any speculative philosophy, misses in its approach and that he " Sensuality "called. In speculative philosophy, this “sensual” (that which is “given to the senses”, also exposed to the delusion of senses) has a negative connotation. It is regarded as an obstacle in the knowledge of truth that has to be overcome with conceptual "abstraction". This abstraction does not start from the sensory impression, but begins, as Hegel emphasized in the introduction to phenomenology , from “pure self-knowledge”: this is the “pure ether” in which one can acquire knowledge. Feuerbach now took exactly the opposite position and said: The sensual is the first reality, all thinking must begin with facing this reality and taking it seriously. Everything else is sterile preoccupation with thinking: because it begins with abstract thoughts, it “does not move away from itself” and “only ever comes to the realization of its own abstractions”. So it prevents “freedom of spirit; because only the perception of things and beings in their objective reality makes man free and free of all prejudices ”.

"New Philosophy"

Feuerbach therefore called for a "new philosophy" which recognizes "the truth of sensuality with joy, with awareness ". Instead of pure self-knowledge, it begins with a confrontation: the thinking I first experiences that a you exists that on the one hand sets limits, on the other hand helps beyond itself. So knowledge begins where the ego encounters resistance in another being: "The true dialectic is not a monologue of the lonely thinker with himself , it is a dialogue between me and you ". The you works back on the knower, because as sensory beings people are not neutral towards things or living beings, they are "affected" by them: they love, hate, admire, reject, etc. So "passion" becomes a criterion of existence "Only what - whether real or potential - object of passion , that is ." In short: "What is not love, can not be loved , which is not . But what cannot be loved cannot be worshiped either. Only what can be an object of religion is an object of philosophy. ”The new philosophy demanded by Feuerbach thereby receives a“ religious ”quality.

The “new philosophy” is therefore dedicated humanism . Since everything supersensible or supernatural, be it an extra-worldly god or an absolute world spirit, is excluded, this philosophy is also materialistic. However, Feuerbach rejected a dull materialism that stops at the point of view and only allows matter to count; he understood his philosophy as “the heart brought to mind”. The mental work, the theorizing, must not be omitted, because objective thinking is entirely possible, provided that this thinking "does not continue in a straight line, in the identity with itself, but is interrupted by the sensual perception". Thought, however, has to accept that the real “ cannot be represented in whole numbers , but only in fractions ”, and above all it has to come to terms with the fact that it never achieves absolute objectivity. It will always remain caught in a certain perspective, because we always think as human beings , all spiritual processing of the sensual reality will always be that of human beings: "Whatever the human being calls and expresses - he always expresses his own being."

This materialism is referred to in secondary literature as "anthropological materialism". It differs from the materialism of the 18th century in the way it looks. He regards humans as a mere "special case", as it were, from the broader whole of nature and strives to trace everything human back to physiological processes and mechanisms (this is why we speak of reductionism ). Feuerbach unreservedly recognized the attempts to explain what was considered “materialistic” at the time: Even if science is still far from being able to prove the origin of life, that in no way means that it cannot in principle. With his now famous dictum “man is what he eats”, he commented approvingly on the book by the physiologist Jakob Moleschott , who for the first time presented the connections between nutrition and metabolism and physical and mental well-being to a broad audience. But Feuerbach's perspective was the opposite: nature, as it is the subject of scientists, was for him “the first physical , but not moral, being; the conscious human being is to me the […] first being in terms of rank ”. His research perspective was therefore the “anthropological” or, to use a current term, the human scientific one: he was interested in the theoretical processing of human phenomena from the point of view of human life. Although this perspective has to get by without the tools of the “exact” sciences, it has to be based on empirical studies and try to understand understandable interpretations. Feuerbach already took the position that is taken for granted in today's human sciences - psychology, sociology, ethnology, etc. And like this he no longer proceeded “systematically”, but restricted himself to one field of research, namely religion. Most of his writings on the essence of Christianity (which he edited twice) have this as their subject, including the famous lectures in the Heidelberg town hall; in the fifties, too, he compiled and commented on sources on theogony (“the emergence of God”) from ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew for eight years .

Materialistic ethics and free will

Even in the essence of faith in Luther's sense, and in more detail in the Heidelberg lectures, Feuerbach rated " egoism " - not to be confused with "selfishness" / " egomania " - basically positive: with the instinct for self-preservation, egoism is natural. Obviously prompted by the sudden success of Schopenhauer's writings , Feuerbach dealt in two writings from the later phase of his life with the question of free will and the related basic questions of materialistic morality . He first established that there is a material basis for human behavior, namely the innate “instinct for happiness”: This is the “primary and basic instinct of everything that lives and loves, what is and wants to be”. It can express itself in forms that seem to run towards it: in the suicide's will to die, in the ideal of the ascetic saint, in Buddhism or in Schopenhauer's pessimism, yet it can always be demonstrated as a basic tendency. Often it is as it were in a state of rest: the “bliss” of health can only be felt when it is absent. Belief in God is also an expression of the instinct for happiness.

Morality must also be based on the instinct for happiness. Its first and only principle is: My own right to happiness corresponds to the other's right to happiness. Good and bad are not metaphysical values: “There is no other mark of being evil than doing evil, no other sign of being good than doing good.” The basis for moral behavior was given by nature, which “produced a two- and mutual instinct for happiness”. This is based on the fact that the human being "has to share the goods of life with his neighbors from the mother's womb, already with the mother's milk [...] with the elements of life, thus also sucking in the elements of morality, as these are a feeling of belonging, tolerance Community, restriction of the unrestricted sole rule of one's own instinct for happiness ”. The task of every morality must therefore be to help this natural condition to unfold: “What else can the task of morality be than this bond established in the nature of things [...] between one's own and others' happiness with knowledge and will to the law of To make human thinking and acting? ”That is why Feuerbach sharply distanced himself from Kant's ethics of duty (which was particularly popular in Wilhelmine Germany ):“ On the other hand, a moral which tears this bond apart, which cases in which duty and the instinct for happiness come into conflict , makes its starting point, the basis of this division, what else can it be than arbitrary human statutes and casuistry ? "

Conversely, if moral behavior is the development of natural conditions, this means that morality is linked to decent living conditions. Feuerbach became political on this point, he also referred explicitly to the description of the workers' misery in Karl Marx's Capital : “There is no happiness without virtue , you are right, you moralists […] but remember, there is no virtue either without happiness - and thus morality falls into the realm of private or political economy ”. Under inhuman conditions, he emphasized, “all leeway is also taken from morality [...] Where what is necessary for life is missing, there is also no moral necessity”. His conclusion was: "If you therefore want to gain entry into morality, above all remove the material obstacles that stand in your way!"

On the question of free will, Feuerbach took positions that come close to the views of today's psychologists and brain researchers. Although he did not deny free will in principle, he saw that it was subject to very narrow limits; A “pure indeterminacy of the will”, as Hegel had postulated it, was rejected from the outset as a theoretical abstraction of traditional philosophy and morality. Here, too, he saw the instinct for happiness as a starting point, because will is essentially wanting something, and this something can only be “wellbeing”, “bienêtre”: “I want, means: I don't want to suffer, I want to be happy.” even for suicide: "I can only want death if it is a necessity for me". Since the will takes place "not on the other side, but on this side" of natural needs, one cannot speak of will at all independently of the instinct for happiness: "But where a being stops wanting happiness, it stops wanting at all". Or, in short: "Will is the will to be happy."

Feuerbach saw the second limit for free will in the individual character. Here he made the statement: "My being is not the result of my will, but, conversely, my will is the result of my being." So man is not what he wants, but wants what he is: the hard-working type finds it easy to work wanting, but the will to enjoy is difficult for him; for the connoisseur type it is the other way round. Most people are not aware of this, which is why they confuse the ease with which they can want one thing or the other with willpower - and thus suppress those who are otherwise predisposed, whom they accuse of corresponding weaknesses of will : Because “man has nothing of the being behind his consciousness knows what comes before his consciousness with the will, so he places the will itself in front of his essence, makes it its a priori , its individual essence into the law of others, its being the ought to be for them. 'I am holy, therefore you should be holy' ”.

Effect on contemporaries and posterity

philosophy

Since Ludwig Feuerbach distanced himself from university philosophy at an early age, there never was a “Feuerbach School”. In the 19th century, however, Eduard Zeller and Kuno Fischer , although Hegelians and Kantians, respectively, orientated themselves to Feuerbach's philosophical historiography and developed it further; Zeller also approached Feuerbach's conceptions in the philosophy of religion. Rudolf Haym welcomed Feuerbach's critical performance, but shied away from the consequences that were critical of religion. He dedicated one of his first writings to Feuerbach.

Karl Marx

Feuerbach had the most significant and most direct influence on the development of Marxian philosophy . Marx took over from him not only criticism of religion (which he radicalized politically), but also and above all anthropological materialism. For him, this was the theoretical basis behind which one could not go back. This is explicitly confirmed by the economic-philosophical manuscripts from 1844 , where the preface says: “It was only from Feuerbach that the positive humanistic and naturalistic criticism dated. The more noiseless, the safer, deeper, richer and more lasting the effect of the Feuerbachian writings, the only writings since Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic that contain a real theoretical revolution ”. On the basis of this “theoretical revolution”, which declares material reality to be primary and thus “turns idealistic philosophy upside down”, there is also Das Kapital : “For Hegel, the thought process is what he even called it Idea transformed into an independent subject, the demiurge of the real, which only forms its external appearance. For me, conversely, the ideal is nothing else than the material implemented and translated in the human mind. "

Marx already indicated the fundamental difference in a letter to Arnold Ruge in 1843 , where he wrote about Feuerbach's Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy : “Feuerbach's aphorisms are not right for me only in the point that he focuses too much on nature and too little the policy indicates. But that is the only alliance through which the current philosophy can become a truth. But it will probably go like in the sixteenth century, when nature enthusiasts corresponded to a different set of state enthusiasts. ”For Marx, the“ alliance with politics ”is decisive, because for him it is about“ changing the world ”. This primacy of politics leads him to seek his own theoretical path in a critical departure from Feuerbach, which is indicated in the theses on Feuerbach (1845): "The main deficiency of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach) is that the object, the reality, Sensuality, grasped only under the form of the object or the intuition; but not as sensual human activity or practice; not subjective. ”The“ essence ”of the human being is not of interest in its natural condition, but as an“ ensemble of human conditions ”. For Marx, therefore, the practical consequence of philosophy is not “anthropology” as it was for Feuerbach, but rather a critique of the economy and the overthrow of social conditions. In order to describe the historical development processes and the concrete social antagonisms , he resorts to Hegel's concepts such as alienation and dialectics with reference to the work .

Until a few decades ago, there was a tendency in Marxist literature to recognize Feuerbach's materialism merely as the most advanced stage of pre-Marxian materialism. Accordingly, Marxian materialism was considered to be theoretically more developed, while Feuerbach was accused of having "overlooked" essentials or not being able to achieve them. The widespread appropriation of the Marxian perspective obscured the core points of Feuerbach's philosophy, so that often only rudiments of it remained. The knowledge acquired in the 20th century about the human psyche and human biology on the one hand, and the damage caused by "active" people to nature on the other have recently given Feuerbach's insistent reference to "nature" and "sensuality" a new legitimacy. So today Feuerbach's anthropological materialism stands on an equal footing with Marx's historical materialism.

Max Stirner

Stirner's book The Single and His Ownership , published in 1844, contains almost programmatic sharp criticism of Feuerbach. His criticism of religion is still "pious", nothing has been gained with it, it has merely "relocated the divine outside of us within us for a change". The "beyond outside of us" has been eliminated, but the "beyond within us" has become a new heaven. Feuerbach read Stirner's review shortly after it was published and expressed himself enthusiastically in private: It was "a highly ingenious and brilliant work" and the author was "the most brilliant and freest writer I got to know". Stirner goes wrong in assuming that “man is us [ie Ludwig and Friedrich Feuerbach] ideal, a thought, a god in the old sense, only mislaid in man”, but basically what he wants is “nothing other than what we want. I agree with him except for one thing. In essence he does not hit me. “In an anonymously published reply , he detailed his defense against Stirner's criticism. Stirner's duplicate appeared immediately and again prompted Feuerbach to add several pages to his replica for the complete edition of his works published from 1846 onwards. That ended the controversy.

Richard Wagner

Wagner was an ardent Feuerbach fan for about ten years. His music-theoretical work The Work of the Future (1850) was dedicated to Feuerbach and included a dedication to him (it was deleted in later editions). At the end of 1851 he sent a letter to Feuerbach to spend the winter with him and Georg Herwegh in Switzerland. But in the mid-1850s, Wagner turned to Schopenhauer.

Gottfried Keller

The Zurich poet Gottfried Keller belonged to the Feuerbach circle in Heidelberg in 1848/49 and, under his influence, broke away from the belief in God and immortality, which he had previously defended. In his autobiographical Bildungsroman Der Grüne Heinrich , he described the hero's final turn to this worldliness in the chapter “The Frozen Christ”: “Now I turned to the works of the living philosopher, who were just about to spread, and who only addressed these questions in his classically monotonous but passionate Language, accessible to general understanding, turned around and around and like a magic bird sitting in a lonely bush, which God sang from the chests of thousands. "

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche had acquired a philosophical education himself in his youth. His readings were accordingly unsystematic, but Feuerbach was one of the authors read; the thoughts of death and immortality and the essence of Christianity were even on the wish list for his seventeenth birthday. Parallels between Nietzsche's youth writings and Feuerbach's philosophy have been pointed out several times in the secondary literature. However, this does not occur in the published works. The more mature Nietzsche noted: "Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, Strauss - all theologians." And: "Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Strauss - it all stinks of theologians and church fathers."

20th century

Few thinkers dealt with Feuerbach's philosophy until around the middle of the 20th century: Karl Barth , Martin Buber , Karl Löwith , Ernst Bloch . Feuerbach is rather avoided in traditional academic philosophy. His thinking resists technical terminology, his rejection of philosophical systems and his essayistic, at times thesis-like writing make it difficult to classify into categories and has brought him the reproach of falling behind a previous level of terminology. Since the late fifties of the 20th century, however, Feuerbach has been attracting more attention again in specialist philosophy, in part also in a broader public. In 1987 an International Society of Feuerbach Researchers was founded, which has since held a number of congresses and published the proceedings. His influence on the current discourse on the rehabilitation of a philosophical anthropology linked to human dignity has since been emphasized several times, most recently by Ursula Reitemeyer-Witt in Volume 8 of the International Feuerbach Research. A department for international fire research has existed at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster since 2010 and is headed by Reitemeyer. Since 1967 works, papers and correspondence have been reissued for the first time in a philologically reliable form. Werner Schuffenhauer, the editor of this edition of the work, has also researched Feuerbach's biography from the ground up and, above all, enriched the correspondence with hundreds of previously unknown documents, which has significantly changed the traditional image of Feuerbach, especially in the former GDR . However, the critical issue has not yet been completed. Lectures from the Erlangen time and parts of the estate are missing.

Vormärz movement

For the oppositional forces of the “ Vormärz ”, which were already broad in the early 1940s , Feuerbach was something of an intellectual leading figure. With his current critical contributions, Feuerbach, along with David Friedrich Strauss , Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer , became one of the exponents of the left-Hegelian movement at an early age . Above all, the essence of Christianity then had a broad impact that philosophical books seldom achieve. It was read less by educated citizens and specialist philosophers than by the “general public”. At least in liberal intellectual circles it collapsed the hitherto almost unchallenged rule of Hegel's categories of thought. Engels wrote in retrospect in 1886: “You have to experience the liberating effect of this book yourself to get an idea of ​​it. The enthusiasm was general: we were all Feuerbachians at the moment. "

politics

One of the main points of Marxist criticism concerned the "apolitical" character of Feuerbach's philosophy. The results of more recent Feuerbach research justify the contrary statement: even in biographical terms, apart from Marx, no 19th century philosopher was as “political” and “progressive” as Feuerbach. He was certainly not qualified to be a political activist. But the noticeably large number of friendships with radical democrats of the Paulskirchen time and with socialist "agitators" (inter alia with Édouard Vaillant , who played an important role in the Paris Commune and later in the socialist movement of France), as well as the veneration he enjoyed in the enjoyed German social democracy - all of this shows that there was considerable political potential in Feuerbach's philosophy. Marx stated in a letter to Feuerbach: "You have - I do not know whether intentionally - given socialism a philosophical basis in these writings, and the communists immediately understood these works in this way." Feuerbach, of course, distrusted a direct political " Implementation “of philosophical theories, he saw dangerous tendencies towards fanaticism and despotism, at least in French socialism.

Scientific materialism

Feuerbach's philosophy had an indirect but significant influence on a whole generation of natural scientists and physicians who no longer wanted to accept supernatural causes for the explanation of natural occurrences. Even before Charles Darwin set up the theory of evolution, they assumed a natural origin and purely physiological regulation of life. Feuerbach was personally acquainted with three of its best-known representatives, Carl Vogt , Jakob Moleschott and Ludwig Büchner ; Moleschott and Büchner also explicitly referred to him in the materialism dispute. For most of these scientists, what Ernst Haeckel said about Albrecht Rau applies : they stood “on the shoulders of Ludwig Feuerbach”. Because of their euphoric and sometimes naive reductionism, they are still referred to as " vulgar materialists " today. Given the status of the biological and elementary sciences at that time, their claim had largely the character of a postulate, but adherence to it ushered in a broad and sustained upswing in natural research in the 19th century. This indirect effect of Feuerbach's philosophy has so far been relatively little researched.

Free religious movements and free thinkers

The free religious and free-thinking movements that arose in the 1840s and met with a broad response in the last third of the 19th century directly referred to Feuerbach. Carl Scholl , an important representative of the free religious, was close friends with Feuerbach. He was also, together with Ludwig Büchner, one of the founders of the first German freethinkers' association.

Human sciences

Feuerbach is certainly one of the pioneers of modern human sciences . In the case of Freudian psychoanalysis , his contribution is undeniable. Max Scheler described him as one of the “great instinctual psychologists”, and Simon Rawidowicz said, referring to Freud's work The Future of an Illusion : “If Freud had listed his predecessors here, Feuerbach should have been in the front row”. Even Max Weber's basic concept of "interpretation" is reminiscent of the process of Feuerbach's critique of religion. Feuerbach's contribution to the emergence of these sciences is certainly only indirect, but all today's human sciences are definitely “anthropological”, i.e. materialistic, in Feuerbach's sense. With this, Feuerbach - among others - paved the way for an explanation of human realities based on real, “objective” findings and developing theoretical models capable of reaching consensus instead of operating with speculative structures of thought, as was the case before him.

All in all, Feuerbach formulated and championed positions in his day against the most violent resistance that have gained increasing importance up to the present day. "Feuerbach's sensualization and finalization of Hegel's philosophical theology has become the standpoint of the time, on which we all now - consciously or ignorantly - stand." (Karl Löwith).

Honors

Memorial plaque and memorial in Nuremberg

Memorial plaque from 1904 on the Rechenberg in Nuremberg after the restoration

For Feuerbach's 100th birthday in 1904, a bronze plaque by the sculptor Fritz Zadow was attached to the former house on the Rechenberg in Nuremberg ; however, the house was demolished in 1916. (The plaque was set up on April 11, 1999 on a stone stele on the Rechenberg not far from the Feuerbach cenotaph ).

In 1904, however, it was not yet possible to erect a memorial for Feuerbach. 25 years later, the free-thinking ( liberal ) Lord Mayor Dr. Hermann Luppe ( DDP ) and many personalities from culture, business and politics created a memorial for Feuerbach and collected for its construction. It found support from, among others, the Monisten ( German Monist Association ) and the Nuremberg Association for Freedom of the Spirit , against which there were violent protests from conservative and right-wing forces, the National Socialists and, above all, the churches. Despite this resistance, a monument was erected from private funds in 1930 and ceremoniously unveiled. It was taken over by the city of Nuremberg in ownership and care. But just three years later, after the National Socialists came to power, it was destroyed on July 1, 1933, to the applause of the NS organizations and the major churches. The money of the Ludwig Feuerbach Foundation was misused to remove the monument, the inscriptions were removed and the large stone block was buried. On July 12, 1933, after Luppe's arrest and removal from office, Willy Liebel declared, among other things:

“On one side of the monument bears the inscription Man created God in his own image . We are of the opinion: God created man in his own image . "

Cenotaph in Nuremberg on the Rechenberg, February 2004

The stone block was found under bomb rubble after the war. In 1955, the city council decided with the votes of the SPD against the votes of the CSU , but also the FDP , as well as against fierce opposition from the churches, to rebuild the monument at its old place on the Rechenberg and with the same inscription.

The memorial contains the dedication: To commemorate the freethinker Ludwig Feuerbach 1804–1872 . On the long sides there are two quotes by Feuerbach: “Man created God in his image” and “Do what is good for man's sake”.

The rebuilding also caused a lot of controversy among the people of Nuremberg. Opponents tried to remove the memorial with an ultimately unsuccessful constitutional complaint. Because of attacks, the memorial had to be placed under police protection at times. It was repeatedly smeared by criminals motivated by Christian fundamentalists or right-wing extremists .

Streets in Nuremberg

Ludwig-Feuerbach-Straße, named in 1875, is located in the Rennweg and Schoppershof districts of Nuremberg . The Philosophenweg, named in 2004, is also in Schoppershof . Ludwig Feuerbach's last house stood near the starting point of this footpath.

Memorial stone in Erlangen

Ludwig Feuerbach memorial stone in Erlangen. The inscription on the bronze plaque affixed to it reads: "LUDWIG FEUERBACH (1804–1872) IMPORTANT PHILOSOPHER AND RELIGIOUS CRITIC STUDED IN ERLANGEN in 1827/28, WORKED HERE AS A PRIVATE DOCTOR FROM 1829, LEFT IN 1836 FOR VICTORY."

On February 6, 2001, the city of Erlangen named a previously unnamed square in Ludwig-Feuerbach-Platz. On September 13, 2002, the 130th anniversary of Feuerbach's death, a memorial stone donated by the Ludwig Feuerbach Society in Nuremberg was inaugurated there.

Ludwig Feuerbach Prize

The Augsburg Association for Freedom of the Spirit has been awarding the Ludwig Feuerbach Prize in honor of Feuerbach since 2001 .

Publications

Critically revised editions

• Ludwig Feuerbach: Collected Works. Edited by Werner Schuffenhauer, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1967 ff. The edition should include a total of 22 volumes: 1–12 the writings published during Feuerbach's lifetime, 13–16 the estate, 17–21 the correspondence, 22 the register and supplements, Corrigenda etc. - This edition offers Feuerbach's writings for the first time on the basis of the manuscripts or first prints, with a note of all later deviations and additions. Compared to previous editions, the correspondence, which is provided with extensive annotations, has been expanded many times over, and numerous writings from the estate are appearing in print for the first time.
• Walter Jaeschke , Werner Schuffenhauer (ed.): Ludwig Feuerbach, drafts for a new philosophy. Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-7873-1077-0 ; In addition to an introduction and detailed comments by the editors, it contains: preliminary theses on the Reformation of philosophy, principles of the philosophy of the future, (cf. Ges. Werke, Akademie-Verlag, Vol. 9) as well as the transition from theology to philosophy, principles of philosophy. Need for change .
• Ludwig Feuerbach: Lectures on logic and metaphysics (Erlangen 1830/1831). Arranged by Carlo Ascheri and Erich Thies . Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1976, ISBN 3-534-06673-1 . - With an extensive introduction by Erich Thies.
• Ludwig Feuerbach: Lectures on the history of modern philosophy from G. Bruno to GWF Hegel (Erlangen 1835/1836) . Arranged by Carlo Ascheri and Erich Thies. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1974, ISBN 3-534-06674-X . - With an extensive introduction by Erich Thies.
• Ludwig Feuerbach: To the moral philosophy (1868) . Advance edition. Critically revised by Werner Schuffenhauer, in: Solidarity or Egoism. Studies on ethics with and after Ludwig Feuerbach . Edited by H.-J. Brown. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1994, ISBN 3-05-002535-2 .

Older work editions, only considering the last versions

• Ludwig Feuerbach: Complete works in 10 volumes, Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1846–66. For this first complete edition, Feuerbach revised most of his works. The earlier writings in particular received many, often extensive additions, but also noticeable modifications in the sense of his later discontinuation. - Rarely in libraries.
• Ludwig Feuerbach: All works. Edited by Wilhelm Bolin and F. Jodl. 10 volumes. Fromann, Stuttgart 1903-1911. Reprint: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Frommann-Holzboog 1959–64, extended by 3 additional volumes, ed. by Hans-Martin Sass (writings for young people and letters, in vol. 12 also the biography of Wilhelm Bolin). - Based on Feuerbach's second or third versions of his works, which were more or less heavily edited. Only limited suitability for dealing with earlier writings.
• Feuerbach in context. Works and correspondence on CD-ROM , Karsten Worm InfoSoftWare , 1st edition Berlin 2004, release 2005, ISBN 3-932094-43-3 . - Offers the entire Bolin-Jodl edition including the 3 additional volumes digitally, with search function.
• Ludwig Feuerbach: Works in six volumes , ed. v. Erich Thies , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1975/76.
• Ludwig Feuerbach: Small writings , with an afterword by Karl Löwith, Suhrkamp Verlag 1966.
• Ludwig Feuerbach, in: Philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche. Selected and introduced by Frank-Peter Hansen. Digital Library Volume 2, Directmedia, Berlin 1998. - Contains The Essence of Christianity , Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy , Principles of the Philosophy of the Future and On the “Essence of Christianity” in relation to the “Individual and His Property” - the same writings and also the history of the modern philosophy from Bacon from Verulam to Benedikt Spinoza are also freely accessible on the Internet at http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Feuerbach,+Ludwig .
• All of Feuerbach's works on Google Books (Jodl / Bolin, edited, Sass; partly original editions)

Individual fonts (selection)

• [ anonymous ] Thoughts on death and immortality from the papers of a thinker: together with an appendix of theological-satyrical xenias , Nuremberg 1830.
• Abälard and Heloise , Ansbach 1834.
• History of modern philosophy , Ansbach 1833–1837, 2 vols.
• Reviews in the field of philosophy , Ansbach 1835.
• Pierre Bayle after his most interesting moments for the history of philosophy and humanity , Ansbach 1838.
• On philosophy and Christianity , Ansbach 1839.
• Das Wesen des Christianentums , Leipzig 1841. ( digitized and full text in the German text archive ) - Reclam edition: Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-004571-1
• About the "essence of Christianity" in relation to the "individual and his property" . (Online: Version 1845 + rev. 1846)
• Principles of the philosophy of the future. Zurich / Winterthur 1843. - Critical edition, Frankfurt am Main 1983 (3rd edition), ISBN 978-3-465-01610-6
• The essence of faith in Luther's sense. Leipzig 1844.
• Lectures on the nature of religion. Leipzig 1851. In addition to additions and notes, new ed. by Wilhelm Bolin: Stuttgart 1908 (= Ludwig Feuerbach's Complete Works. Volume 8).
• Theogony, based on the sources of classical Hebrew and Christian antiquity. Leipzig 1857.

literature

To the biography

• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  Feuerbach, Ludwig. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 25-28.
• Wilhelm Bolin (Ed.): Selected letters from and to Ludwig Feuerbach. 2 volumes. O. Wigand, Leipzig 1904. (Digital copies: Volume 1 , Volume 2 ) - Bolin was a confidante of Feuerbach. Even after the death of the philosopher, he remained in close contact with his wife and daughter. Many of the biographical details that he shares apparently come from personal communications.
• Karl Grün : Ludwig Feuerbach, presented in his correspondence and legacy as well as in his philosophical character development. 2 volumes. CF Winter, Leipzig 1874. (Digital copies: Volume 1 , Volume 2 )
• Adolph Kohut : Ludwig Feuerbach. His life and works are described from the best, most reliable and in some cases new sources. With unprinted letters from Ludwig Feuerbach and Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach . F. Eckardt, Leipzig 1909.
• Alfred Kröner, “The educated middle class in the 19th century. The Feuerbach family in Franconia ”, in: Enlightenment and criticism . Special issue 6/2002, ISSN  0945-6627 ( digitized version )
• Alfred Kröner: Paul Johann Anselm and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach as exponents of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century. Special issue 12 of the journal Enlightenment and Criticism , Nuremberg 2007 (= Diss. Univ. Erlangen-Nürnberg), ISSN  0945-6627
• Carl von Prantl :  Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, pp. 747-753.
• Werner Schuffenhauer: "Foreword to the collected works of Ludwig Feuerbach", in: Ludwig Feuerbach: Collected works , Volume 1, second, reviewed edition, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-05-000252-2
• Ruth-Eva Schulz:  Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 113 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Josef Winiger : Ludwig Feuerbach, thinker of humanity. Lambert Schneider Verlag, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-650-24030-9 .

On the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach

• The International Society of Feuerbach Researchers has been publishing the presentations of its congresses in anthologies since 1971, which cover a wide range of topics. The content of the individual volumes is listed on the website of the Ludwig Feuerbach Society in Nuremberg .
• Atheism under discussion. Controversies about Ludwig Feuerbach. Edited by Hermann Lübbe and Hans-Martin Sass. Munich, Kaiser [u. a.], 1975, ISBN 3-459-01037-1 .
• Ludwig Feuerbach. Edited by Erich Thies. Scientific Book Society Darmstadt, 1976 (= Paths of Research , Volume CDXXXVIII). - Contains important texts on Feuerbach from the first half of the 20th century: Karl Barth, Karl Löwith, Ernst Bloch u. a., ISBN 3-534-06675-8 .
• Ludwig Feuerbach and the philosophy of the future. Edited by H.-J. Braun, H.-M. Sass, W. Schuffenhauer and F. Tomasoni. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1990, ISBN 3-05-001065-7 .
• Sensuality and rationality. The upheaval in 19th century philosophy. Edited by W. Jaeschke. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 199, ISBN 3-05-002293-0 .
• Solidarity or selfishness. Studies on ethics with and after Ludwig Feuerbach. Edited by H.-J. Brown. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1994, ISBN 3-05-002535-2 .
• Ludwig Feuerbach and the history of philosophy. Edited by W. Jaeschke and F. Tomasoni. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1998, ISBN 3-05-003306-1 .
• O homem integral. Antropologia e utopia em Ludwig Feuerbach. Edited by A. Veríssimo Serrão. Lisboa 2001. (Also contains articles in German, French and Italian), ISBN 3-05-003306-1 .
• Materialism and spiritualism. Philosophy and Sciences after 1848 . Edited by Andreas Arndt and Walter Jaeschke. Hamburg, Felix Meiner Verlag 2000, ISBN 3-7873-1548-9 .
• Ludwig Feuerbach and the continuation of the Enlightenment. Edited by Hans-Jürg Braun, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-907576-54-3 .
• Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Identity and Pluralism in Global Society. Edited by Ursula Reitemeyer, Takayuki Shibata and Francesco Tomasoni, Münster, Waxmann Verlag 2006, ISBN 3-8309-1626-4 .

Selection of individual representations

• Henri Arvon: Ludwig Feuerbach or La transformation du sacré . Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
• Carlo Ascheri: Feuerbach's break with speculation. Critical introduction to Feuerbach: The Need for Change (1842) . Translated from the Italian by Heidi Ascheri. Frankfurt / M 1969.
• Hans-Jürg Braun: The philosophy of religion Ludwig Feuerbach. Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-7728-0307-5 , comprehensive presentation of the topic.
• Michael Czerny : Feuerbach the teacher and Marx the prophet. An introduction to religion . Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods, University of Chicago, Chicago 1978.
• Jens Grandt: Ludwig Feuerbach and the world of faith. Westphalian steam boat, Münster 2006, ISBN 3-89691-637-8 .
• Volker Mueller: Ludwig Feuerbach. Criticism of Religion and Freedom of Spirit. Angelika Lenz Verlag, Neustadt am Rübenberge 2004, ISBN 3-933037-43-3 .
• Eckhart Pilick: Consciousness of the Infinite. Feuerbach's criticism of religion and free religion. Rohrbach 2005, ISBN 3-930760-61-4 .
• Simon Rawidowicz: Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophy. Origin and destiny. Berlin 1931 (reprint 1934, 1964). - Comprehensive, still indispensable monograph.
• Ursula Reitemeyer: Philosophy of corporeality. Ludwig Feuerbach's draft of a philosophy of the future. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-518-11417-4 .
• Hans-Martin Saß: Ludwig Feuerbach. With testimonials and photo documents. Rowohlt's monographs. Reinbek 1978 and other editions, ISBN 3-499-50269-0 .
• Alfred Schmidt : Emancipatory sensuality. Ludwig Feuerbach's anthropological materialism (= series Hanser. Vol. 109). Hanser, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-548-03348-2 .
• Werner Schuffenhauer: Feuerbach and the young Marx. Berlin, Verlag der Wissenschaften 1965. Second, edited edition 1972. - Fundamental work on the subject.
• Jörg Salaquarda: Feuerbach, Ludwig. In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Vol. 11, 1983, pp. 144–157.
• Erich Thies: Ludwig Feuerbach. Between the university and town hall or the Heidelberg philosophers and the 48 revolution. Issue 2 of the series of publications by the Heidelberg City Archives. Brigitte Guderjahn Verlag, Heidelberg 1990, ISBN 978-3-924973-32-2 .
• Francesco Tomasoni: Ludwig Feuerbach and non-human nature - the essence of religion. The genesis of the work, reconstructed on the basis of unpublished manuscripts. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Frommann-Holzboog 1990, ISBN 3-7728-1354-2 , (it.original Ludwig Feuerbach e la natura non umana , La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1986).
• Francesco Tomasoni: Ludwig Feuerbach - origin, development and meaning of his work. Waxmann, Münster and New York 2015, ISBN 978-3-8309-3213-0 , (it. Orig. Ludwig Feuerbach. Biografia intellettuale, Editrice Morcelliana, Brescia 2011).
• Marx W. Wartofsky: Feuerbach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1977, ISBN 0-521-21257-X .
• Christine Weckwerth: Ludwig Feuerbach. For the introduction. Hamburg 2002, ISBN 978-3-88506-354-4 .

Web links

Commons : Ludwig Feuerbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Ludwig Feuerbach  - Sources and full texts

Wikiquote: Ludwig Feuerbach  - Quotes

• Literature by and about Ludwig Feuerbach in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Ludwig Feuerbach  in the German Digital Library
• Feuerbach's collected works as scanned PDFs on hegel.net
• Van A. Harvey:  Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
• Karl Baier: Sketch of Feuerbach's life and work (PDF; 72 kB)
• Hans-Christoph Rauh: Wilhelm Bolin's philosophical correspondence with Ludwig Feuerbach (PDF; 77 kB), Enlightenment and Criticism 2/2007
• Ludwig Feuerbach Society Nuremberg e. V.
• Master's thesis on the Feuerbach family (PDF) (= special issue 6/2002 of Enlightenment and Criticism ; 1.28 MB)
• International Society of Feuerbach Researchers V.
• Ludwig Feuerbach at Praxisphilosophie.de
• Works by Ludwig Feuerbach in the Gutenberg-DE project

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The homestead on the Rechenberg, consisting of three main buildings and two auxiliary buildings, had been affiliated to the Nuremberg Regional Court and the Nuremberg City Tax Office since 1826. See Alfred Kröner, Paul Johann Anselm and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach as exponents of the middle class in the 19th century. Life and Effects , "Enlightenment and Criticism", special issue 12/2007, p. 114.
2. ↑ Gustav Radbruch , in: Gustav Radbruch – Gesamtausgabe , ed. Arthur Kaufmann, CF Müller Verlag, Heidelberg 1997, Volume 6, p. 59 f.
3. ^ Wilhelm Bolin, in: Selected letters from and to Ludwig Feuerbach. Verlag von Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1904, as well as: Julie Stadler: Memories of the Feuerbach family. , quoted in: Adolph Kohut: Ludwig Feuerbach. Leipzig 1909, p. 355.
4. ↑ Gustav Radbruch : The Feuerbachs. An intellectual dynasty. In: Gustav Radbruch – Complete Edition. P. 333 ff., As well as Theodor Spoerri : Genius and Illness. A psychopathological examination of the Feuerbach family. Basel 1952.
5. ↑ Josef Winiger , Ludwig Feuerbach. Thinker of humanity. Berlin 2004, pp. 41-48; New edition Darmstadt 2011: pp. 37–42.
6. ↑ Prof. Dr. Werner Schuffenhauer, www.ludwig-feuerbach.de Text of the 200th birthday of Ludwig Feuerbach. Berlim, on July 8, 2004.
7. ^ Letter to Konrad Deubler dated December 19, 1863.
8. ↑ Pierre Bayle. A Contribution to the History of Philosophy and Humanity , GW 4.
9. ↑ See Josef Winiger: “Feuerbach's enthusiasm for communism in the mid-1840s. A chronological exploration ” , in: Enlightenment and Criticism 2/2012, focus on Ludwig Feuerbach. Series of publications by the Ludwig-Feuerbach-Gesellschaft Nürnberg e. V., Volume 3, pp. 104-121. New version on the website of the Ludwig Feuerbach Society Nuremberg (accessed on December 13, 2015)
10. ↑ See Hans-Jürg Braun and Heinrich Mettler: "Ludwig Feuerbach and Gottfried Keller", in: Hans-Jürg Braun (ed.), Ludwig Feuerbach and the continuation of the Enlightenment. Pano Verlag, Zurich 2004, as well as Wolfgang Deppert: "Relations between philosophy and poetry using the example of Feuerbach's philosophy and Keller's poetry", in: Volker Mueller (Ed.), Ludwig Feuerbach - Religionskritik und Geistes Freiheit, Neustadt am Rübenberge 2004, p. 287 -325.
11. ^ Letter to Friedrich Kapp dated March 14, 1851, GW 19, p. 273
12. ^ Alfred Kröner, Paul Johann Anselm and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach as exponents of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century , pp. 110 and 111. - Feuerbach himself reports on the police shadowing in letters from June 24th and 25th, 1851
13. ↑ GW 10, p. 358. - For the two writings see Winiger, Ludwig Feuerbach, Denker der Menschlichkeit , pp. 284–286
14. ↑ The membership lists from this time are lost, but the facts are well documented by other sources.
15. ↑ Collected Works , ed. by Werner Schuffenhauer, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, Volume 14, p. 27. - Feuerbach is quoted here throughout from this edition, in the following abbreviated with "GW" plus volume number.
16. ↑ GW 1, pp. 19 and 95. Feuerbach gave a brief summary of the argument in “Fragments for the characteristics of my philosophical curriculum vitae”, GW 10, p. 151.
17. ↑ See Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, “Hermeneutics in Historiography. Feuerbach on the problem of interpretation ”, in: Walter Jaeschke and Francesco Tomasoni (eds.), Ludwig Feuerbach and the history of philosophy . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1998, pp. 16–32.
18. ↑ There is currently only the edition in: Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy from G. Bruno to GWF Hegel (Erlangen 1835/1836), edited by Carlo Ascheri and Erich Thies. Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1974. The final edition planned for GW 15 is in progress.
19. ↑ Foreword to Volume I of the Complete Works (1845); GW 10, p. 185.
20. ^ GW 2, p. 51.
21. ↑ Presentation, development and criticism of Leibniz's philosophy , GW 3
22. ^ GW 1, p. 207.
23. ^ GW 1, p. 209.
24. ↑ GW 2, pp. 5-37. Feuerbach greatly changed and expanded this introduction for the third edition from 1847.
25. ↑ The philosophy of law according to a historical view… GW 8, pp. 37–40.
26. ↑ Feuerbach himself emphasized this connection several times, for example in the lectures on the essence of religion (second lecture, GW 6, p. 16).
27. ↑ GW 8, pp. 181-207 and pp. 219-292. The second work was originally entitled “The true point of view from which the“ Leo-Hegelian dispute ”must be judged; in relation to the articles contained in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung about this ”. The censorship forbade the publication in the "Hallische Jahrbucher" after two episodes, which is why Feuerbach brought it out as an independent font.
28. ↑ See especially GW 8, p. 237.
29. ↑ GW 5, p. 15.
30. ↑ GW 5, p. 16 f.
31. ↑ GW 5, p. 29. Italics by Feuerbach.
32. ↑ GW 5, pp. 31 and 32 (quotation after the 2nd edition)
33. ^ GW 5, p. 49.
34. ↑ GW 5, pp. 127 and 166. Italics by Feuerbach.
35. ^ GW 5, p. 128.
36. ^ GW 5, p. 116.
37. ^ GW 5, p. 120.
38. ^ GW 5, p. 126.
39. ^ GW 10, p. 190.
40. ↑ Feuerbach wrote the preliminary theses as early as the beginning of 1842. The censorship prevented them from being printed, so that they could only appear in Switzerland in 1843.
41. ↑ Principles of the Philosophy of the Future , § 24, GW 9, p. 302.
42. ^ GW 9, pp. 203 and 251.
43. ↑ GW 9, p. 320
44. ^ GW 9, p. 339.
45. ^ GW 9, pp. 318 and 319.
46. ↑ GW 9, p. 330.
47. ^ GW 9, p. 261.
48. ↑ See also Das Wesen der Religion , GW 10, pp. 18-20, and lectures on the essence of religion , GW 6, pp. 148 f. - see also the article by Francesco Tomasoni: “Feuerbach's Critique of the Ideology of Science and Theories of Evolution”, in: Hans-Jürg Braun et al. (Ed.): Ludwig Feuerbach and the philosophy of the future, Berlin 1990, pp. 77–92. According to Tomasoni, Feuerbach became aware of Charles Darwin fourteen years before the publication of The Origin of Species .
49. ^ Lectures on the essence of religion , GW 6, p. 29.
50. ↑ “On Moral Philosophy”, edited by Werner Schuffenhauer, in: Solidarity or Egoism. Studies on ethics with and after Ludwig Feuerbach . Edited by H.-J. Brown. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1994, p. 365.
51. ^ GW 11, p. 76.
52. ↑ Both quotations: “On Moral Philosophy”, edited by Werner Schuffenhauer, in: Solidarity or Egoism. Studies on ethics with and after Ludwig Feuerbach . Edited by H.-J. Brown. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1994, p. 410.
53. ↑ Both quotations: GW 11, p. 78.
54. ↑ “On Moral Philosophy”, edited by Werner Schuffenhauer, in: Solidarity or Egoism. Studies on ethics with and after Ludwig Feuerbach . Edited by H.-J. Brown. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1994, pp. 404, 405 and 406.
55. ↑ ^{a b} “On Moral Philosophy”, edited by Werner Schuffenhauer, in: Solidarity or Egoism. Studies on ethics with and after Ludwig Feuerbach . Edited by H.-J. Brown. Berlin, Akademie Verlag 1994, p. 367.
56. ^ GW 11, p. 59.
57. ^ Both quotations: GW 11, p. 107.
58. ↑ Feuerbach and philosophy: a contribution to the criticism of Beider , Halle 1847. - For Feuerbach's influence on these thinkers see S. Rawidowicz: Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophy. Origin and Destiny , Berlin 1931, pp. 325–331.
59. ↑ MEW , supplementary volume I, p. 468. More detailed in the last part, "Critique of Hegelian Dialectics and Philosophy in General"
60. ^ Afterword to the 2nd edition, MEW Vol. 23, p. 27
61. ^ Letter of March 13, 1843, MEGA I, 1/2, p. 308
62. ↑ 1st and 6th thesis, version from 1845
63. ↑ As one of the most important works on this question: Alfred Schmidt: Emanzipatorische Sinnlichkeit , pp. 17–30; Quotation “most advanced level […]” ibid p. 119. - Comprehensive description of the influence of Feuerbach on Marx: Werner Schuffenhauer: Feuerbach and the young Marx . Berlin, Verlag der Wissenschaften 1965. Second, revised edition 1972.
64. ↑ cf. Motto for the "First Department"
65. ^ Max Stirner: The single and his property , Stuttgart: Reclam 1972, p. 34; 170.
    For a modern interpretation of Stirner's view, cf. Bernd A. Laska: The negation of the irrational superego in Max Stirner .
66. ^ Letter to Friedrich Feuerbach, [November 1844], GW 18, pp. 416 and 417.
67. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach: About the 'essence of Christianity' in relation to the 'individual and his property'. In GW 9, pp. 427-441.
68. ^ Max Stirner: Reviewers of Stirner. In: ders .: Parerga, reviews, replicas. Nuremberg: LSR-Verlag 1986, pp. 147-205.
69. ↑ On the relationship between Wagner and Feuerbach see Helmut Walther: Feuerbach, Wagner and the artwork of the future , http://ludwig-feuerbach.de/feuwagn.htm
70. ↑ The Green Heinrich , Vol. 4, chap. 12 in both versions. Feuerbach is also mentioned here by name; also in the chapter "The Philosophers and Girls' War", vol. 2, chap. 7 of the first and chap. 9 of the second version.
71. ^ Curt Paul Janz: Friedrich Nietzsche , Vol. 1, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1993, p. 404 and p. 23.
72. ↑ Examples in Simon Rawidowicz: Ludwig Feuerbach's Philosophy , pp. 336–339
73. ^ Fragments , summer to autumn 1884, 26 [8] and 26 [412]. - For the relationship between Feuerbach and Nietzsche, see Helmut Walther: "Biedermann and Visionaries - Feuerbach and Nietzsche", http://ludwig-feuerbach.de/nietwagn.htm
74. ↑ See Karl Barth: “Ludwig Feuerbach. Fragment from a lecture held in Münster iW in the summer semester of 1926 on 'History of Protestant Theology since Schleiermacher'. With a polemical epilogue ”, in: Erich Thies (Ed.), Ludwig Feuerbach . Scientific Book Society Darmstadt 1976, p. 15 f.
75. ↑ See Alfred Schmidt : Emancipatory Sensuality . Hanser series, Munich 1973, p. 73 f.
76. ↑ "International Society of Feuerbach Researchers"
77. ↑ https://www.waxmann.com/waxmann-reihen/?tx_p2waxmann_pi2%5Breihe%5D=REI100207&tx_p2waxmann_pi2%5Baction%5D=show&tx_p2waxmann_pi2%5Bcontroller%5D=Reihe&cHashceba=2fdb45
78. ↑ Ursula Reitemeyer: Practical anthropology or the science of people between metaphysics, ethics and education, Münster 2019, p. 13, p. 60 ff
79. ↑ International Office of Fire Research. Accessed July 31, 2019 . 
80. ↑ Feuerbach himself was astonished to find out, see the foreword to the 2nd edition of the essence of Christianity , GW 5, p. 23 f. - Although there are no reliable estimates of the readership, a large number of testimonials indicate that the reading audience was very diverse.
81. ^ " Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy ". Various issues; the quote can be found towards the end of the first part. - A cultural-historical description of this effect can be found in: Thomas Nipperdey : Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866. Citizen world and strong state. Munich 1983, pp. 443-447.
82. ↑ See Josef Winiger: Ludwig Feuerbach. Thinker of humanity. Eine Biographie , Berlin 2004, pp. 315-317.
83. ↑ See the call by the Nuremberg section of the SDAP for Feuerbach's funeral on the Ludwig-Feuerbach-Gesellschaft's website
84. ↑ GW 19, p. 376. Marx refers to the principles of the philosophy of the future and the essence of faith in the sense of Luther .
85. ↑ Cf. on this the letter "To Karl Grün", July 11, 1846, GW 19, p. 77 f., As well as the letter to Jakob von Khanikoff, where Feuerbach writes that he "attaches itself to socialism, at least to French does not want to agree to fanaticism and despotism. Every opinion, every conviction in general, which does not recognize the right of individuality, and consequently also the right of the same to the opposite of this conviction, seems to me to pass into fanaticism and despotism ”. (GW 21).
86. ↑ Die Weltträtsel, 11th edition, Leipzig 1919, p. 305.
87. ↑ Worth reading on this topic: Wolfgang Lefèvre: "Science and Philosophy at Feuerbach", in: Walter Jaeschke (Ed.): Sensuality and Rationality. The upheaval in philosophy in the 19th century: Ludwig Feuerbach , Berlin 1992, pp. 81–100.
88. ↑ See Werner Schuffenhauer: "Feuerbach and the free religious movement of his time", in: Volker Mueller (ed.), Ludwig Feuerbach - Religionskritik und Geistes Freiheit , Neustadt am Rübenberge 2004, pp. 33–42. Also: Helmut Steuerwald: "Carl Scholl (1820–1907)." From Protestant clergyman to free thinker, www.ludwig-feuerbach.de/lf_scholl.htm
89. ↑ Simon Rawidowicz: Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophy. Origin and destiny . Berlin 1931, p. 348 f. - Scheler quote, ibid, p. 346.
90. ^ Epilogue to: Ludwig Feuerbach. Small fonts . Frankfurt / M, Suhrkamp 1966, p. 249.
91. ^ Alfred Kröner, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the City of Nuremberg. Gedenken und Denkmäler ”, in: Enlightenment and Criticism , Issue 1/2004, pp. 164–170; Horst-Dieter Beyerstedt: Feuerbach monument . In: Michael Diefenbacher , Rudolf Endres (Hrsg.): Stadtlexikon Nürnberg . 2nd, improved edition. W. Tümmels Verlag, Nuremberg 2000, ISBN 3-921590-69-8 ( online ). ; Helmut Steuerwald: Franke (n) and free. Ludwig Feuerbach, Environment - Life - Work - Resonance. In: Ludwig Feuerbach. Criticism of Religion and Freedom of Spirit. Edited by Volker Mueller, Neustadt am Rübenberge 2004, ISBN 3-933037-43-3 , p. 27 ff.
92. ↑ Michael Diefenbacher , Steven M. Zahlaus: Lexicon of Nuremberg Street Names , self-published by the Nuremberg City Archives , Nuremberg 2012, p. 356
93. ↑ Michael Diefenbacher , Steven M. Zahlaus: Lexicon of Nuremberg Street Names , self-published by the Nuremberg City Archives , Nuremberg 2012, p. 423
94. ^ Archive of press reports 1999-2002 on the activities of the Ludwig Feuerbach Society in Nuremberg . Retrieved January 20, 2014

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