Introduction

Love, Death, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Philosophy of Revolution
  • Peter C. Caldwell
Chapter

Abstract

Ludwig Feuerbach’s psychological theory of religion pervaded radical political thought in Germany in the 1840s. Radicals found in it a way of thinking that questioned the legitimacy of established institutions and authorities. The critique was radical: not just of the established church, but of religion in general; not just of the existing, undemocratic state, but of the state and its institutional forms (especially army and bureaucracy) in general; and not just of the existing patriarchal family, but of legalized forms of interpersonal relationships in general. In the hothouse political atmosphere of Vormärz Germany, the young men and women informed by Feuerbach found that even he was an institution to be attacked. The strongest criticisms of his thought appeared before the revolution from those heavily under his influence, such as the socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the anarchist individualist Max Stirner.

Keywords

Patriarchal Family Abstract Institution Concrete Relationship Established Church Transcendent Claim 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Georg Herwegh, ed., Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Zürich: Verlag des Literarischen Comptoirs, 1843).Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    See esp. John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism 1805–1841 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Feuerbach to Christian Kapp, Nov. 1/3, 1837, GW 17:303; on the importance of Strauss’s book for the educated bourgeoisie, see Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2007), 245.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Karl Löwith, “Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie” (1928), in Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 5, Hegel und die Aufhebung der Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert—Max Weber (Stuttgart: J. B.Metzler, 1988), 4.Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, in GW 12 is the standard scholarly edition. The first edition was translated by James A. Massey as Thoughts on Death and Immortality: From the Papers of a Thinker, along with an Appendix of Theological-Satirical Epigrams (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar
  6. 9.
    From the correspondence it appears that Feuerbach was made aware of the utopian socialists through letters from Ruge and Marx in 1844 (see the letters from Ruge to Feuerbach of Feb. 4, 1844, and May 15, 1844, and from Marx of Aug. 11, 1844, as well as Feuerbach to Friedrich Kapp, Oct. 15, 1844, all in GW 18:320–23, 346–52, 376–79, 395–99). A letter from Hermann Kriege to Feuerbach, April 18–19, 1845, in GW 19:19, suggests that Feuerbach agreed with the “true socialist” critique of society but questioned whether the masses were ready for revolution; see also Werner Schuffenhauer, Feuerbach und der junge Marx. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der marxistischen Weltanschauung, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1972), 127–28Google Scholar
  7. Jens Grandt, Ludwig Feuerbach und die Welt des Glaubens (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2006), 115–17.Google Scholar
  8. 10.
    In English, Wolfram Siemann’s (1985) The German Revolution of 1848–49, trans. Christiane Banerji (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998)Google Scholar
  9. Jonathan Sperber’s excellent Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991)Google Scholar
  10. Dieter Dowe, et al., eds., Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform, trans. David Higgens (New York: Berghahn, 2001).Google Scholar
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  12. 11.
    Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964)Google Scholar
  13. Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980).Google Scholar
  14. 15.
    Dittmar, Zur Charakterisirung der nordischen Mythologie im Verhältniss zu andern Naturreligionen. Eine Skizze (Darmstadt: Leske, 1848), 23.Google Scholar
  15. 17.
    See Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, trans. and ed. Marshall S. Shatz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. 18.
    Letter to Gustav Bäuerle, May 31, 1867, in GW 21:302-3, cited in Manuela Köppe, “Zur Entstehung von Ludwig Feuerbachs Schift ‘Über Spiritualismus und Materialismus, besonders in Beziehung auf die Willensfreiheit,’” in Materialismus und Spiritualismus. Philosophie und Wissenschaften nach 1848, ed. Andreas Arndt and Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000), 43–4.Google Scholar
  17. 21.
    Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1966), 5.Google Scholar

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© Peter C. Caldwell 2009

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