feuerbach's religious consciousness in the space of hyperreality
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Cover Page Copenhagen University Philosophy Department Date: _____January 2, 2014___________________ Name: ____Kristijonas Voveris_____________________________ Student ID: _____gpv895______________________ Phone: ________50205898___________________ E-‐mail: [email protected]_____________________________ Teacher’s name: _____Martin Pasgaard-‐Westerman________________________ BA-‐Level __ Master _x_ Module: __________2__________________________ Course: _________4761__-‐ E13________________________ Examination form (See Curriculum) _______B______________________________________ Number of Standard pages: ___18_____ Number of Keystrokes: ____45,009_______ http://philosophy.ku.dk/curriculum/
Feuerbach’s Projected Consciousness as a Form of Simulation
Feuerbach’s contribution to philosophy is remembered as a pivotal point for the
development of materialism as well as providing a basis for atheism. The analysis of
religious consciousness was a central vehicle for Feuerbach’s approach to
philosophy: his criticism of the history of philosophy, as well as serving as a point of
departure with respect to Hegel. While his impact within Western and Continental
philosophy may have been absorbed mostly through subsequent criticisms by Marx
& Engels and Stirner, the originality of his philosophy has been only scarcely
investigated. As a result, the basic aspects of his theory of projection are fairly well
known, yet more specific implications of his theory that establishes human nature as
projected upon objects of material reality has room for further analysis.
Feuerbach was a student of Hegel’s, and the development of his philosophical work
is reads as a critical response to the dominant figure in German idealism. It would be
impractical, therefore, to attempt an analysis of Feuerbach’s work without
addressing his relation to Hegel and the development of spirit, which I will begin
this paper with, in order to clarify the method through which Feuerbach developed
his philosophy. Next I intend to evaluate the criticisms of his work by Marx and
Stirner, as these effectively constrained further study of his work, and point towards
crucial areas of his work. I find that a common theme of these two significant
criticisms addresses the abstract content of Feuerbach’s projected conception of
human nature, and I hope to find a way to reconcile these by taking an aesthetic
approach, inspired by Baudrillard’s claim that all we ever have is representations
“each competing for the chance to stand in for a Real that was never present to
begin with.”1 Placing Feuerbach’s analysis of consciousness amidst a world where
symbols are exchanged not for meaning, but for other symbols, in which both
religion and the concepts of human nature – or the ‘species consciousness’ which he 1 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York City, N.Y., U.S.A: Semiotext(e), Inc, 1983. 22 2 Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Evans Marian. The Essence of Chrstianity. Cambridge: Cambridge
analogously referred to – can exist as simulations, would allow the individual
experiences of these historically universalizing forces to remain authentic.
Feuerbach’s work has been mainly disseminated into the history of philosophy
through the criticisms by Marx and Stirner. His reception through these criticisms
simultaneously established Feuerbach as a significant figure in the development of
continental philosophy, while limiting his scope to that of a merely instrumental
figure in the development of humanistic materialism. Consequentially, the study of
Feuerbach’s work by English scholarship remains severely constricted by the lack of
reviewed translations of much of his work beyond the Essence of Christianity. It is a
curious fact that the latter, his unarguably seminal work, only availed itself to
Anglophone study after being translated by Mary Anne Evans, better known to
readers by her literary pseudonym George Elliott, in 1854. The introduction of
Feuerbach’s work by a literary figure rather than an established academic may have
made it unattractive to study in the academic circles, and the dominating Utilitarian
and British Idealist revival schools of thought were scarcely interested in the work.
Despite the lack of penetration into Anglo-‐Saxon academia, what is perhaps the root
of the largest shortcoming in the study of his work is the common way in which
Feuerbach’s work is taught – as a transitional figure into the works of Marx, Stirner
and other, more influential thinkers. With so much analysis of Feuerbach presented
in relation to his influence in shaping Marx’s theories, for instance, few studies of
Feuerbach’s work for their own sake, many areas of his thought remain for the most
part, unanalyzed. For instance, questions about the method through which
Feurbach’s process of the projection of human nature functions are seemingly
poorly analyzed, and are only sporadically addressed. I hope to address this by
introducing the analysis of Feuerbach’s projection theory as simulacra.
Inverting the Hegelian Dialectic
Throughout the bulk of philosophical tradition leading up to the 19th century,
religion historically assumed a vertebral role, being involved in all central aspects,
from the basis of metaphysics and epistemology to logic, ethics, value theory, the
philosophy of language, science and so on. The inseparability of religion from
philosophy is punctuated by the fact that the distinct sub-‐discipline of “the
philosophy of religion” was not explicitly referred to as such until the 17th century.
Throughout much rationalist thought, treatment of questions about the possibility
and nature of God, his relation to man, and God as a basis for ethics is deeply
imbedded in the content of works such as Descartes’ Meditations. Hegel’s work
allowed this course of the history of philosophy to begin to change by discussing
religion as a stage of his diachronic analysis of the development of human spirit in
the Phenomenology. The place of religion with respect to spirit gradually progresses
via the dialectical process, beginning from a way of addressing the concern with the
fundamental and mainly ontological questions that drive philosophy, eventually
attaining a separation of the self from the divine through a developed notion of self-‐
consciousness. In the Hegelian process of development of Spirit, religious
consciousness is the last stage before the developed philosophical consciousness
surpasses it for the triumphantly named state of Absolute Knowledge. Despite the
omniscience-‐implying title, Hegel makes it clear that this self-‐realization of Spirit is
less of a God like achievement of ultimate truth than a completely reflexive state of
self-‐consciousness, in which spirit becomes conscious not only of itself but also the
process through which it attains this consciousness. However this overcoming of
religion follows Hegel’s dialectical process insofar as a synthesis is required to
produce the final stage, and the philosophical consciousness is manifested in fact, as
a form of unity between religion and philosophy.
This process of the development of spirit begins with the nature religion that is
manifested through natural phenomena and objects before progressing through the
thoroughfare of representation into “art religion”. In this state, spirit understands
itself through religious consciousness, but only by means of representation, which
remains problematic for Hegel. Since Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology is to find
a means of unifying philosophy and ‘lived’ life, he sees the represented self-‐
consciousness as one that is both made possible and restricted by the
representation. Feuerbach’s development of self-‐consciousness follows that of Hegel
in the sense that the religious consciousness precedes philosophical self-‐
consciousness as the first, indirect self-‐consciousness of man: “man first of all sees
his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself.”2 With a focus on the
representational aspects, Feuerbach’s religion as objectified consciousness can be
seen as an extension and investigation of Hegel’s “art religion” of representation,
placing its content into more explicitly materialistic terms, and allowing religion to
be justifiably studied as an anthropological phenomena.
In his earlier writings, namely Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy, Feuerbach
stated his methodological framework by declaring himself as a radical empiricist,
and thus characterizing knowledge as being the immediate sensuous intuition of
particulars. From this basis his critique of Hegelian philosophy unravels into what
Gregor describes as the inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, and the drive towards
materialism that it implies becomes the crucial foundation for Marx's material
determinism. 3 In opposition to idealism, Feuerbach formulates this inversion
accordingly: “We must always render the predicate the subject and as subject the
object and principle – thereby inverting speculative philosophy to reveal the pure,
unvarnished truth.”4 The direct contention towards Hegelianism here is that Hegel
took abstract predicates and reified them as concrete subjects. With respect to
religion, this is done by taking the predicates of man, stripping them of
determinateness or categorical qualification, and projecting them behind the world
to become God.5 Feuerbach’s central paradigmatic shift is in seeing religion as “a
relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature (i.e. his subjective
2 Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Evans Marian. The Essence of Chrstianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; 12 3 Gregor, James. "Marx, Feuerbach and the Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic." Science & Society. 29.1 (1965): 66-‐80. 4 Feuerbach quoted in 4 Gregor, James. "Marx, Feuerbach and the Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic." Science & Society. 29.1 (1965) 5 ibid 69
nature); but a relation to it viewed as a nature apart from his own.”6 In this sense,
the divine being becomes thoroughly anthropomorphized into an objectification of
the human being, and all the attributes of the divine being are, as a result predicated
from the attributes of the human being. Through this move, the characterizations of
God become accessible through a very direct method of explication. The
sympathetic character of divine nature in relation to the telos of man is no longer a
mystery, and man is no longer striving to attain the divine value, he is instead
creating the values of the divine in order to attain consciousness of himself. This
consciousness, however, is indirect, and has an inherent element of alienation in its
form.
Feuerbach’s radical move is to see the dialectic as “a dialectic of consciousness
rooted in the very condition of material human existence”7, which consists of human
needs, interests and wants which are inherent in the interdependence of human
beings with other human beings and nature. Since the mechanisms of this dialectic
are all dependent on sensible experience, the human sensibility, Sinnlichkeit, is then
“an expression of the material conditions of human experience.”8 However,
Feuerbach’s notion of materialism is not so radical as to require a reductionism to
the basic atomic level; reductionism is not part of his agenda with respect to religion
or consciousness. What he is actively opposed to is his perceived tendency of
speculative philosophy towards transforming the real, sensuously grounded
attributes of mankind into transcendent subjects which are self-‐subsistent as a
result of their abstracted conception, yet ultimately vacuous in content.9 Both
theology and philosophy are potential victims of this alienating drive, and the
solution is a deceptively straightforward one: the requirement that the predicates
6 Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Evans Marian. The Essence of Chrstianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; 14 7 Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 20 8 ibid 9 Gregor, James. "Marx, Feuerbach and the Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic." Science & Society. 29.1 (1965): 70
that have been exalted to self-‐subsistence be ascribed to real subjects. “Philosophy,”
he proposes, “does not rest on an Understanding per se, on an absolute, nameless
understanding, belonging one knows not to whom, but on the understanding of
man”, with the abstractions of Idealism as his target. “This philosophy has for its
principle, not the Absolute Identity of Schelling, not the Absolute Mind of Hegel, in
short, no abstract, merely conceptual Being, but a real being, the true Ens
realissimum – man.”10
Once God is established as an entirely human concept, religion can be studied not
through mere rationalization but must be traced through its ‘real’ materializations
throughout human history. The role of religious representations -‐ whether it is in
oral tradition, image, writing, or any other tangible form – becomes more relevant to
gaining knowledge about religion than any attempt to access the idea of divinity
through a purely rational process. Unlike a rationalist conception of God such as that
of Descartes – which can be known and accessed through deductive argument alone
– or the idealist project, which holds the idea of God attainable by means of a
constructive and synthetic process of self-‐consciousness, the content of a study of
God under Feuerbach would be the representations created through religion. As a
result, the study of religion becomes accessible empirically, with anthropological
analysis of its representations assuming the focal point. This “reduction” of religion
to anthropology is in fact a part of Feuerbach’s larger task of characterizing
philosophy as “nothing but the process of human self-‐understanding, as the attempt
at human self-‐knowledge”11. By bringing the nature of philosophy back to a human
life activity, Feuerbach hopes to demystify it, and recognize it for its positive,
anthropological content.
Feuerbach’s Anthropological Project
10 Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Evans Marian. The Essence of Chrstianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; 14 11 Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 3
The revival of interest in Feuerbach (Kamenka, Wartofsky, Morris) seems to
capitalize mostly on his anthropological approach towards philosophy. The
anthropological element in his philosophy begins with a recognition of the human,
as a natural subject, as both the content and form of philosophy. Feuerbach perhaps
goes to an extreme with the implications of this notion of a natural philosophy by
considering his own work as being a form of natural science, more so than
philosophy, as he claimed to rely exclusively on sensory observable data.12 While
this may be an exaggerated claim, it underlines his predisposition as an empiricist
when it comes to the origin of knowledge. However, Feuerbach’s empirical
inclination does not in effect mean that his goals were to construct a system that
was devoid of abstraction. Instead, in a letter a peer, he declared that the aim of his
method was “to achieve a continuous unification of the noble with the apparently
common, of the distant with the near-‐at-‐hand, of the abstract with the concrete, of
the speculative with the empirical.”13 The speculative philosophy of Hegel was
therefore missing an empirical element for him, just as pure empiricism lacks an
element of speculation. The ability to see the connection between the two as real,
and not just conceptual, is inherent in the conception of philosophy as an entirely
human activity. The starting point for Feuerbach’s philosophy is thus a very simple
statement: “I am a real, a sensuous, a material being; yes the body in its totality is
my Ego, my being itself.”14 The concern in his work is predicated to be first and
foremost the common experience of mankind; an experience born of practical
activity that is accessible to any human.
Recent scholarship has extended the anthropological analysis of philosophy towards
Hegel’s work as well. Lewis makes this move in his exegesis of Freedom and
Tradition in Hegel, placing the development of subjective spirit in analogy with the
structure of human development. With respect to religion, this results in seeing 12Kamenka, Eugene. The philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970. 94 13 Feuerbach, quoted in Hook, Sidney. From Hegel to Marx : studies in the intellectual development of Karl Marx. New York: Columbia University Press, 224 14 Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Zawar Hanfi. The fiery brook : selected writings. London New York: Verso, 2012.
Hegel’s treatment of religion as an attempt to reconcile freedom and tradition. As a
part of this, reason is understood as being generated by traditions rather than being
an alternative to them, making a study of the human condition – and thus a
anthropologically grounded study – a requirement of any philosophy that hopes to
explain the role of religion. Both reason and religious consciousness are examined in
the structurally same developmental fashion in Hegel’s work, with a requirement of
this being the identity of the content of philosophy and religion – an axiom which
Feuerbach later adopted. This anthropological grounding is essential to Hegel due to
his project of reconciling philosophy with lived life, which requires a basis upon
which philosophy can be applied into ethical and political practice. However, where
Hegel culminates with respect to religion is in a requirement that religion must be
implicitly rational in order to have this basis for application. To him, this was best
embodied in German Lutheranism, which was the dominating religious paradigm.15
However, while in structure Hegel’s Phenomenology introduces an anthropological
move throughout the development of self-‐consciousness and religion, in content
there is a severe lack of the real material applicability of an approach that is
genuinely based on self-‐consciousness as an activity of human life. Where Hegel
showed signs of progress towards an anthropologically grounded philosophy,
Feuerbach saw the lack of real material applications and developed The Essence of
Christianity as an answer to these perceived shortcomings in Hegel’s thought.
Religion as it appears
With religion established as an entirely human activity, the basic and foremost
biological needs of the human – food, water, air, sex – and the more complex ones
arising from sustained fulfilment of the latter – love, social existence, creative
activity, law and hope – become the content that is represented in religion. The
Christian symbols of bread and wine – the body and blood – are in fact effigial forms
of the basic needs of the human. This subsumption of the symbolic under human
nature serves as a distinct negation of the traditional unbridgeable divide between 15 Lewis, Thomas A. Freedom and tradition in Hegel : reconsidering anthropology, ethics, and religion. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.
the divine and the profane corporeal. The symbols of the divine no longer belong to
the divine realm but exist primarily as human created entities with the function of
signifying the extension human needs.
The content of religion and philosophy is the same for Feuerbach, both being the
human struggle towards self-‐consciousness, however in religion the mode of
cognition is representational. As religion is objectified in symbolic objects, the
images of religion become necessary representations, as he proposes, “belief
requires an image, or it becomes a belief in nothing.”16 On this basis I would like to
move the discussion towards an aesthetically grounded approach.
I would like to propose that Baudrillard’s conceptual work on hyper-‐reality can
significantly expand the exegesis of Feuerbach’s objectification of human nature in
religion, particularly by giving the representations in religion a conceptually
essential role in supporting the entire structure of religion. His work in Simulations
and Simulacra explicitly discusses religion, reconstructing it under the radical
framework of hyper-‐reality through simulacra: “before the simulated transparency
of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the
world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-‐real), there is no
longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.”17 To render this point
more accessible I will first try to explain his concept of hyperreality, a term which
Baudrillard coined himself. In its most basic sense, it is “the generation by models of
a real without origin or reality.”18 This is carried out by means of simulacra, which
can function by means of either real material objects, or conceptual entities,
however as such, their essence is not limited to their use value or objective
condition, but instead contributes to the existence of a simulation through means of
the symbolic order of things.
16 Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 231 17 Baudrillard Simulations 104 18 ibid 1
Religion, from a demystified, materialistic point of view satisfies the requirements
of existence in the sphere of hyper-‐reality, as the origin of God and the entire
structure of religion is misplaced within the divine subject that is held to be
ontologically independent from man. Feuerbach’s argument that the origin of God is
in an objectified human nature allows religion to be exposed as precisely this kind of
simulation. Hyperreality then works similarly to this objectification in the sense that
God, once unconsciously objectified into an independent subject, becomes part of
the real frame of existence of man, to whom the divine provides an extension of the
constrained and limited aspects of real man, the unmet needs of love and feeling.
But to function, hyperreality needs simulacra, which are in this case objects that
allow the divinity to be simulated as existing independently from man; and I would
like to follow and expand Baudrillard’s argument that the simulacra of religion
consist of images.
Perhaps the most direct image of religion is the icon. Baudrillard presents this idea
by musing in character: “I forbade that there be any simulacra in the temples
because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented.”19 Indeed it can,
he sharply retorts, and continues to argue this on the basis of the power of icons
that have been historically used to animate divinity. While orthodox theology would
consider icons and religious images as lower-‐rank representations of Platonically
ideal divine images, Baudrillard ascribes the value of the icons through their
negation – the iconoclasts. “One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of
disdaining and negating images, were those who accorded them their true value, in
contrast to the iconolaters who only saw reflections in them and were content to
venerate a filigree God.”20 By negating the images of religion, the iconoclasts
ascribed to them the value that those who revered them assumed for granted and
were unable to discern. The very real danger that iconoclasm posed to Christianity,
and the reaction to it from the church authorities, especially those of the Catholic 19 ibid 5 (in quotations in text) 20 ibid 5
church, were historically of great significance. The power of the image as simulacra
to the simulation of religion resonates with a particular argument with respect to
the role of the image, that Feuerbach derives from his central argument of the
objectified nature of religion. Namely he proposes that the value of religious art,
music and especially architecture, is not in dedication to the divine, but in reverence
to the abilities of man to create such an object. The magnificence and constructed
reverence that these objects attain, whether it is the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s
Basilica, ancient structures like the Pyramids, or even the Megachurches of
evangelized America today, ultimately point back towards their makers and those
who make them possible through economic and political means.
Having begun to establish the simulating role of religious art, I believe it would be
illuminating to return to Hegel’s concept of “art religion”, through a critical analysis
of the function of religious representations as simulacra. For Hegel, the
representation of gods through the arts develops in a similarly diachronic way, with
the artist creating a statue or visual likeness of god bearing the role of the
intermediary between God and man. The limitation of this basic form of
representation is the artist’s inability to remove themselves from the artwork, a
qualification that would require a productive analog of the Kantian disinterested
aesthetic appreciation that is self-‐contradictory. The muteness of the gods in
visually represented form is then addressed by making them speak through hymns,
which Hegel ascribes as a higher element of representation. “This higher element is
Language – an outer reality that is immediately self-‐conscious existence… The god
therefore who has language for the element of his shape is the work of art that is in
its own self inspired, that possesses immediately in its outer existence the pure
activity, which when it existed as a thing, was in contrast to it.”21 The linguistic
aspect of the hymn expands its ability to represent divinity, however the
representation of god is present in an impermanent way, as opposed to the
permanent nature of the statue, and therefore a move towards a form of religious 21 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Unpublished (Draft). Cambridge University Press, 2013. eBook. 632-‐633
life through cult which unifies both the verbal and the visually represented media.
As part of the process of cult, the construction of holy buildings is an action that
transcends the particularity of the individual artist, as it “begins with the pure
sacrificial dedication of a possession, which the owner, without any apparent
advantage to himself, pours out or lets rise up in smoke.”22 In this action the owner
of the object of this dedication renounces his right of possession, in a move towards
attaining universality, yet the result misses this goal altogether. Instead the objects
once again attain reverence but instead of being directed at the individual artist or
architect, the result becomes a display of economic conditions and political power
for the greater order, the society or nation that these objects belong to. However
their value as religious objects remains upheld by virtue of a simulated aspect; the
symbolism and iconic value of any religious structure still presents the foreground
and points upwards towards the divine.
In the cult stage of religious development, consciousness exists in a positive, joyous
relation to the divine, a feeling manifested in religious feasting. “In this enjoyment,
then, is revealed what that divine risen Light really is; enjoyment in the mystery of
its being.”23 The final manifestation of this phase for Hegel’s religious consciousness
is in exalting the warrior-‐athlete, as a type of living statue, an embodiment of the
ethical spirit, in what to Hegel is known as “the living work of art”.24 25 This
particular instance involves not a mediation between the divine and man, but a
direct reverence of the object of veneration, as a form of human perfection. The
living work of art is in Feuerbach’s terms an objectification of the attributes of the
human species in a particular individual. Yet this too meets its limitations as the
finite nature of corporeal individuality restrains the possibility of representation,
and Hegel’s process turns towards literary forms.
22 ibid 634 23 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Unpublished (Draft). Cambridge University Press, 2013. eBook. 637 24 ibid 25 Stern, Robert. Routledge philosophy guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of spirit. London New York: Routledge, 2002. 188
Greek drama was postulated by Hegel as a form of culmination for religion in the
form of art, preceding the moment of Spirit’s transcendence of art religion by means
of the incarnation of God.26 Until then, art played the largest role in simulating
religion and representing the relation of God to man. This relation is very strikingly
illustrated by the various forms of Greek theatre. The epic, to begin, could be
considered the most humanly universal form of any of the Greek drama, occurring
as in the pre-‐historic frame of oral traditions within most cultures, and as such
existing with a degree of universality among mankind. In the epic, the gods are
guides and masters of the determinate actions and destinies of the heroes. The
particular, individual self is placed against the universal and positive nature of the
divine, and as such the self only attains self-‐consciousness in relation to the divine,
as in Feuerbach’s alienated nature of religion.
The relation of God and man shifts pivotally in the tragedy, in which individuals are
visibly more in control of their destinies in relation to the Gods. The human beings
of the tragedies are depicted as having attained a self-‐consciousness that is
independent of the divine, and act with the knowledge of their own rights and
powers. The heroes and heroines of tragedies speak for themselves, but the divine is
still present as a form of demarcation of the limits of human individuality. This is
carried out by means of the Chorus, which – in a manner mirrored later by Nietzsche
in his Birth of Tragedy – Hegel capitalized upon as conveying the sense of
powerlessness of the human in relation to the gods. With a Dionysian intoxication as
its mode of operation, the chorus functions by assigning to fate the role of the divine,
which cannot be mediated by reason, and instead exhibits its catharsis upon the
human by means of the lyrical. This powerlessness “clings to the consciousness of
an alien fate and produces the empty desire for ease and comfort, and feeble talk of
26 Stern, Robert. Routledge philosophy guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of spirit. London New York: Routledge, 2002. 189
appeasement.”27 In the form of tragedy, while the subjective individual characters
approach an independent self-‐consciousness, the divine through the form of the
lyrical remains the limiting and alienating factor in of man’s relation to religion.
The power of Greek tragedy which persists to this day is its capacity to engage
individuals into a dialogue with their own understanding and, feeling. This capacity
exists through much of religious art, and for this reason the unmasking of the
illusion of God through Feuerbach’s theory of projection does not discredit the value
of these works of art entirely. Instead the aspects of the artwork which remain
validly emotionally and intellectually engaging – even to the atheistic modern
observer – remain by virtue of the theory of projection, since their source is
ultimately the real emotional and intellectual engagement of the artist, of real and
empathetically functional themes. The interpretation of religious representation as
simulacra has a strong advantage over a straightforward interpretation of these
works as representations, since they are religious works only insofar as they pertain
to the simulation of religion, while the aesthetic qualities that pertain to them exist
regardless of the religious content. For instance, Breughel’s painting The Road to
Calvary, upon a close inspection of its details reveals itself as a markedly devotional
picture, with Christ carrying a crucifix depicted at the center, Mary and John and the
Mourners of Christ in the foreground, and the hill of Calvary in the distant right
corner. The same painting, however, contains a much broader range of subjects than
just the story of crucifixion alone: there is a commotion of grief, torture, and above
all a callousness of a certain superstitious drive. The multiplicity of interpretations
and experiences originating in one piece of artwork are indicative that the religious
content for which the artwork serves as simulacra is only one of these possibilities,
and the requirement for experiencing this religious content ultimately depends to
the projection of self through religious consciousness into the artwork.
27 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Unpublished (Draft). Cambridge University Press, 2013. eBook. 651
Returning to Marx’s Criticism
Self-‐consciousness, for Feuerbach, is not a dialogue of self-‐consciousness of the self
with the other within itself – via the Hegelian process of alienation and its
overcoming – but a dialogue of the self with a distinctly sensible “other”, which is
materially real. The object becomes the other for us through the awareness of the
self’s dependency on it, through the very real and material human needs, whether
they are of biological or sentimental nature. This is the essential philosophical
content of the Essence of Christianity, but it is attained through a criticism of religion,
and partially because of this approach, the object of the other ultimately remains
within the category of belief. This inability to establish the sensible object outside of
the category of belief is, for Marx and Engels’ criticism, Feuerbach’s greatest
shortcoming, as the understanding of the sensuous world remains limited “on the
one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other hand to mere sensation”.28
The abstracted sense in which Feuerbach sees the real, materialistically grounded
man whose consciousness he is describing is the main issue at hand for Engels, who
directs the attention at several maxims Feuerbach puts forward, such as “Man
thinks differently in a palace and in a hut.”29 In this short maxim, one could discern
an precursory attitude to the radically materialistic philosophy of Marx and Engels,
in which the objects through which consciousness is made possible are not merely
the mirrors of man’s consciousness, but exist reactively as part of man’s
consciousness, which shapes and is shaped by his external reality. “Feuerbach wants
sensuous objects, really differentiated from thought-‐objects, but he does not
conceive human activity itself as activity through objects.”30
The accusation of an inability from Feuerbach to see human activity as a materially
grounded phenomena stems from what Marx considers “the chief defect of all
hitherto existing materialism”, namely that all materialists who had recognized the
28 Marx-‐Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Bd. 5, p. 32-‐34 29 Feuerbach quoted in Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels. Basic writings on politics and philosophy. Trans. Lewis Feuer. New York: Anchor Books, 1989. Print. 30 Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach (New York, 1934) p. 73
existence of a reality independent of men were unable to see that this reality, as it
appears to us through real historical conditions, is a product of human activity itself.
Marx would probably (ant quite justifiably) argue that even Descartes’ wax could be
better explained by tracing its route in reverse through the chain of consumer,
distributor, manufacturer, and innovator of productive methods, than a meditation
on the its inalienable substance. The radical materialism of Marx is correct in that
Feuerbach fails to embrace the broader implications of the projected object of self-‐
consciousness he discovers in religion, and in doing so extend into a materially-‐
transformative reformation of man’s relation to himself and others, however,
insofar as this paper is concerned with the philosophy of religion, Feuerbach is
successful in laying the foundation for materialism by reconstructing one of its main
limitations – the religious arguments for divinity and soul – as a projection of human
nature existing objectively in material terms. If this action were to be taken one step
further into post-‐modernity by considering religion as a simulation, with an
existence that has objectivity and independence of the subjective individual moment
by means of its simulacra, Marxist criticism of the religious content in Feuerbach
would be poorly founded.
Stirner’s criticism and the distinction of essence and accident
While Marx’s criticism predominantly targeted the abstracted notion of thought-‐
objects obtained through human projection, Stirner's opposition is directed towards
Feuerbach's insistence that the human species and not the individual human being
himself constitutes human nature. The existential freedom, through an
'untranscendable particularity', which Stirner refers to as Uniqueness, is strictly at
odds with this foundation of human nature as being in the species consciousness.
Feuerbach's concept of normative ethics hinges on this 'species consciousness',
which Stirner attacks as a form of naturalistic fallacy. In Stirner’s view, this is a
mistaken dissolution of the individual into the universal. Through his criticism he
assumes this motion that individual feeling – pain, pleasure or emotion – can be
substituted or subsumed by universal feeling. The problem consists in seeing these
experiences of the ‘species consciousness’ that affect the individual through
sympathy or jealousy as essesntially universal.
In his response to Stirner's treatment of the universality of human essence in The
Essence of Christianity in Relation to The Ego and Its Own, Feuerbach first retorts by
making his approach less intellectual and focusing on Love as the principle that
defines the common shared human essence31. Love between the self and the other,
first between the man and the woman, and later towards children, and
progressively further towards universality in relation to the community through
tradition. However, while the defense through basic human relations fits
accordingly with Feuerbach’s project of constructing philosophy that addresses
common human experience, a transcendental concept of species consciousness
strikes as justifiably contradictory. However, his insistence on this concept of the
species as naturally transcendent is upheld by virtue of the ability of individuals to
ascribe to themselves the values of a broader group of individuals – whether it is a
community or a species in general – through a recognition of the projection of the
self into other individuals. “It is the idea of the species,” Feuerbach postulates “ that
brings deliverance; for the idea of the species allows me to delight in possibilities
which are “mine” although I may never realize them.”32 Here too the framework of
hyperreality can assist an analysis of Feuerbach’s philosophy, by helping resolve the
contradiction between the transcendentality of the species and the self-‐declared
materialistic and empirical method of Feuerbach’s philosophy. If we allow the
‘species concept’ to be a simulated entity, constructed by means of a unity of
attributes of the human individuals in particular, the universality of the species can
exist as a concept within hyperreality, allowing the individuals to attain the type of
‘deliverance’ from the constrictions of the particular, limited subjective experience
that Feuerbach proposes the species can provide.
31 Gordon, Frederick M. "Stirner's Critics." Philosophical Forum. 8.2-‐3-‐4 (1976): 343-‐386. Print. 32 Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Chrstianity. Trans. Marian Evans, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. eBook. 318
Conclusion
In my focus on the representational aspects of religion and human nature, viewing
religion as a form of simulation – a view which Feuerbach himself has been
influential in making possible – permits an analysis of religion by means of its
representations. In doing so, this paper remains committed to the empirical aspect
of Feuerbach’s work, allowing religion and human nature to be studied by means of
objectively accessible representations, while providing a defense from Marx’s,
Enegels’ and Stirner’s objections of transcendentality and abstraction which would
otherwise be prone to contradicting Feuerbach’s thesis of reconstructing philosophy
in material terms. By identifying the source of religion in human nature and
establishing it as a concept within the space of the hyperreal, religion can be
interpreted in entirely humanistic terms, while existing as a simulated space into
which the constrained aspects of human material existence can be extended. The
benefits of this, as opposed to a rigid adoption of atheism, is in the preservation of
the positive content of religion that consists of projecting human needs and feelings
into a form of universality, albeit a simulated one. The ‘species consciousness’
which is the focal point of Stirner’s criticism exists in Feuerbach’s philosophy as a
philosophical answer to religion, once its illusory nature has been demystified, and
remains pregnant with possibility as a foundation for self-‐conscious and reflexive
humanism.
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