Home

Feuerbach 1804 - 1872 (68)

The idea of God is the ignorance which solves all doubt by repressing it.


QUOTES

The Essence

of Christianity



Ludwig Feuerbach was born on 28 July 1804 in Landshut, Bavaria, the fourth son of a distinguished lawyer. He studied theology at the University of Heidelberg and then turned to philosophy and attended Hegel's classes in Berlin for two years. In 1828 he began his studies in natural sciences at Erlangen and in 1830 he published his first book entitled "Thoughts on Death and Immortality" which brought him to a rift with Hegel and deprived him of his university career due to his intense anti-Christian position. Feuerbach managed to teach for a year at the invitation of the Heidelberg Revolutionary Students' Association, but spent the rest of his life alone and in dire financial straits, writing books that brought him little income. His major works were: A Critique of Hegel's Philosophy (1839), The Essence of Christianity (1841), The Essence of Religion (1845), and Lessons on the Essence of Religion (1851). His thought influenced the development of the Marxist dialectic.

Feuerbach has gone down in history mainly with "The Essence of Christianity", for his influence on Marx and for his anthropological interpretation of theological thought, focusing on man. He argued that attributes of God such as omniscience, justice and love are nothing more than a reflection of corresponding needs of human nature, that man is not a creation of God but God a creation of man the outward manifestation of his inner nature. He died in Nuremberg in 1872.