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Ludwig Feuerbach
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The Essence of Religion (Great Books in Philosophy) Kindle Edition

by Ludwig Feuerbach (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 13 ratings
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Originally published in 1845, this concise critique formed the basis of thirty later lectures delivered in 1848 by Ludwig Feuerbach, one of Germany''s most influential humanist philosophers. In The Essence of Religion Feuerbach applied the analysis expounded in The Essence of Christianity (1841) to religion as a whole. The main thrust of Feuerbach''s argument is aptly summed up in the original subtitle to this work: "God the Image of Man. Man''s Dependence upon Nature the Last and Only Source of Religion." Feuerbach reviews key aspects of religious belief and in each case explains them as imaginative elaborations of the primal awe and sense of dependence that humans experience in the face of nature''s power and mystery. Rather than humans being created in the image of God, the situation is quite the reverse: "All theology is anthropology," he says, and "the being whom man sets over against himself as a separate supernatural existence is his own being."Feuerbach goes on to argue that the attributes of God are no more than reflections of the various needs of human nature. Further, as human civilization has advanced, the role of God has gradually diminished. In ancient times, before human beings had any scientific understanding of the way nature works, divine powers were seen behind every natural manifestation, from lightning bolts to the change of seasons. By contrast, in the modern era, when an in-depth understanding of natural causes has been achieved, there is no longer any need to imagine God behind the workings of nature: "He who for his God has no other material than that which natural science, philosophy, or natural observation generally furnishes to him . . . ought to be honest enough also to abstain from using the name of God, for a natural principle is always a natural essence and not what constitutes the idea of a God."Feuerbach''s naturalistic philosophy had a decisive influence on Karl Marx and radical theologians such as Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss. His incisive critique remains a challenge to religion to this day.
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  1. ISBN-13
    978-1591022138
  2. Sticky notes
    Not Enabled
  3. Publisher
    Prometheus
  4. Publication date
    December 4, 2009
  5. Part of series
    Great Books in Philosophy
  6. Language
    English
  7. File size
    2461 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) was a highly respected nineteenth-century philosopher who focused on the study of post-Hegelian philosophy, idealism, naturalism, materialism, and positivism. Feuerbach’s book, The Essence of Christianity, is noted as an influential atheist text, and helped inspire the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Feuerbach was educated at the University of Berlin.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002I61F6C
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Prometheus (December 4, 2009)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 4, 2009
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 2461 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 75 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 13 ratings

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4.9 out of 5 stars
4.9 out of 5
13 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

S
5.0 out of 5 stars I don't know which of the two books I'd recommend reading first
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2016
Verified Purchase
This is Feuerbach ten years after The Essence of Christianity. It's briefer and more general. I don't know which of the two books I'd recommend reading first, but I will say that this is a beautiful translation in a beautiful typeset. Of course it's an analysis of religion from an atheistic or humanistic point of view. Feuerbach has a style and personality that's worth experiencing. He is both accessible and relevant to the non-specialist.
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benjamin
4.0 out of 5 stars The Essence of Feuerbach's Essence of Religion
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2006
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First, it should be noted that this work is not the complete Essence of Religion written by Feuerbach in 1845, but a selection of three essays from that work as translated by Alexander Loos in 1873. However, one will get the main thrust of what Feuerbach was arguing if one takes the time to read this short digest whose original subtitle was "God the Image of Man: Man's Dependence uon Nature the Last and Only Source of Religion".

Feuerbach says very little that is new in this book; one can find many of its main ideas in Friedrich Schleiermacher's work On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, particularly the notion that religion is fundamentally the feeling of dependence within man. In defining the religious impulse as "intuition of the universe", Schleiermacher very much set the stage for the materialistic interpretations of Feuerbach that were to come a generation later.

In fact, Feuerbach seems to want to set Schleiermacher on his head, inverting the notion of dependence and intuition of the universe into dependence upon Nature (which has now been deified). Thus, not only is there a projection of humanity's feeling of dependence onto Nature called "God", but a further step in that projection where God (ie, man's projection) is now said to create humanity in His own image. Religion, then, is based on a type of vicious hermeneutical circle - until Feuerbach, of course.

Feuerbach stands at the tail end of the Enlightenment's disenchantment of the world. As he himself puts it, "man disappears by the side of a God; only where the earth is depopulated of Gods, where the Gods ascend into heaven and change from real beings into imagined ones; only there men have space and room for themselves, only there can they show themselves without any restraint as men and put themselves forward as such" (41 - 2).

One of the most interesting things about this brief compendia is how often Feuerbach turns to Protestantism's founding theologian, Martin Luther. While Luther undoubtedly would have been horrified at the emptying of Protestantism into secularism, the question of anthropocentrism as being the heart of Protestant theology - even in its secular parodying - is raised in Feuerbach rather starkly.

Karl Barth, the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, one wrote that in Feuerbach we have an "anti-theologian" and in this he was certainly correct. Next to no one reads Feuerbach any more, and this is probably due to the fact that his arguments against religion as supernatural are largely trapped within a mid-19th century hermeneutical horizon where Reason and Science still permeated the then-modern social imaginary in ways that we ourselves are now skeptical of. Nietzsche, however, would argue at the end of the 19th century that the "death of [the Christian] God" meant that humans also had to abandon Christian morality. This does not seem to have occured to Feuerbach, but the flight of the Gods that he describes certainly places a considerable level of context behind persons such as Nietzsche and, after him, Heidegger. The question is whether or not the flight of the Gods has really benefitted us or simply left us devoid of grace?
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Kithmini
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on March 12, 2017
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Needed this for class but I learnt SO MUCH.
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