The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach - Essay Example

Ludwig Feuerbach was one of the philosophers that made an impact on Marx’s philosophy in its early period, contributing to creating the foundation for later Marxist thought, in terms of explaining the concept of alienation for a materialistic, rather than spiritual approach. In his main work, “The Essence of Christianity”, Feurbach explains religion and the creation of God in anthropological terms: the religious God has been created by man as an outward projection of the mankind’s own needs of a better, positive self image, an image of qualities that man realizes he does not always possess. This is why the Christian God, the Jewish God, Buddha or any African God, for example, are wise, just and powerful1. All of man’s characteristics are gathered and joined in a larger than life, larger than man figure, with all of these characteristics projected on a grand, infinite scale. Feuerbach himself states that God is “of mans species-essence, the totality of his powers and attributes raised to the level of infinity”2. Feuerbach’s atheism may, for some part, resemble the classical atheism to which Marx himself adheres. However, we may notice that in Feuerbach’s case, God is not a non-existence, he is a creation. We may argue that Feuerbach implies the creation by a small group of people (the clergy, the religious class that exists in every society) of an infinite figure that will reflect the ambitions and needs of the entire mankind. Gods are images of the people itself and, in this sense, will reflect the main characteristics of those people. So far, we have stated that, according to Feuerbach, God is an image of man. Nevertheless, we are aware that in all monotheistic religions, God is the Supreme Being of the existential Universe, the most powerful element of the Universe. A creation of man has become more powerful than the Creator itself. Substituting the Creator and the Created, Feuerbach states that it was man that created God and not the other way around. This anti-theological (I would not consider it necessarily atheist, looking at atheism in its stricto-sensum definition of denying God’s existence altogether) paradox leads to alienation: man is separated from its own creation, which has become more powerful than himself. For Feuerbach, the subject (man) has become the object, hence the state of alienation in which he finds himself. Marx intervention is not necessarily on the conceptualization of religious alienation, but on the causes of this religious alienation that Feuerbach has defined and justified as a product of man’s spiritual creation, God. Marx goes further than this, one step ahead in judging religious alienation. Spiritual religious alienation was a product of mankind creating God, but the actual cause of this was related to material alienation that was only the characteristic of the real world. Material alienation, the existence of social and economic inequality in the real world, led Christians to create the Kingdom of Heaven where everybody is equal and a just God who looks onto Earth and only lets the poor in Heaven. We have to turn at this point at Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, essential work refuting Feuerbach’s philosophical concepts of alienation and, in my opinion, the fourth point is fundamental in Marx’s negation of Feuerbach’s concept of alienation. It states, referring to Feuerbach’s framework with two worlds, religious and secular, that “the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis”3. As such, in Marx’s opinion, the alienation/duplication between the secular and religious worlds needs to be followed by a subsequent recognation of the allientaion/duplication of the secular world itself. The religious world is a projection of the secular world (this is Feuerbach’s idea sustained by Marx), but the the secular world itslef has alienation processus whose causes need to be analyzed. So, we may at this point refer to two levels of alienation, as perceived and described by Feuerbach and, subsequently, by Marx. The first level of alienation is described by Feuerbach as a divine-secular alienation or as an anthropological-theological alienation. The objet created by man, God, as a concept and entity, has become the subject. The second level of alienation is pushed even further by Marx. Certainly man has become an object, but the cause is not in a theological alienation as seen by Feuerbach, but in the causal framework of the real world. Mankind has been pushed beyond a theological alienation into a social and economic one. The problem, according to Marx, is not necessarily that man has become alienated with God. We may go as far as to point out that God is not even in an equation that Marx conceives (it would be an interesting point to disucss Marx’s atheism, but we will build on presuminGod does not exist according to Marx). Man has become alienated due to the social gasp that occurred in society and this is the starting point of the entire analysis, according to Marx. Certainly, we can also go as far as seeing that this starting point has later on led to the entire economic creation that Marx produced. Social equity, the abolishment of the State and the power in the hands of the people are all ideas constructed on the concept of social alienation. Take for example the State. In my opinion, State substitutes itself to Feuerbach’s God and it seems only natural to be so, given Marx’s denial of the theological God. State in society according to Marx has become alienated from the very people it is supposed to lead. This is due to several reasons, but mainly because it is no longer reflecting the needs of the entire population in a certain nation. The social and economic differences are a clear example in this sense, according to Marx: State has failed to manage issues so that all could benefit from its power. Going back to Feuerbach for a while, we can notice the dualism between the two philosophers. In one case, Feuerbach’s conception resides on the idea of alienation between a theological God that man created and mankind. In Marx case, State substitutes the theological God and the results are the same, including the switch between subject and object. Indeed, State itself is a creation of mankind. State did not create man or the population, mankind created the State as a powerful entity able to coordinate and sum all its necessities. State has failed in its task to do so and has become an entity that only controls, no longer positively coordinates. In Marx’s idea, the abolition of the State as higher entity has become a necessity. Certainly, if we look at this succinct conclusion of Feuerbach’s and Marx’s ideas, Marx relies quite a lot on Feuerbach’s ideas to create his own system of thought. Nevertheless, Feuerbach’s system is transformed to fit Marx’s own economic explanations of the world and of the alienation occurring in everyday life and in society. Bibliography 1. Marx, Karl. Theses on Feuerbach. Marx/Engels Internet Archive. On the Internet at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. Last visited on 27/01/2006 2. Ludwig Feuerbach. On the Internet at http://atheisme.free.fr/Biographies/Feuerbach.htm. Last visited on 27/01/2006 3. What is the significance of the concept of alienation in Marks thought? On the Internet at http://interconnected.org/matt/archive/james/Alienation.html. Last visited on 27/01/2006 4. Engels, Frederick. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. 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