Feuerbach

by Friedrich Engels

Now, feelings of affection between man and man, and particularly between members of the two sexes, have existed as long as mankind has. Love between the sexes has been cultivated especially during the last eighteen hundred years and has won a place which has made it, in this period, a compulsory motive for all poetry. The existing positive religions have limited themselves in this matter to the bestowal of complete consecration upon the State regulation of sexual love, and might completely disappear tomorrow without the least difference taking place in the matter of love and friendship. Thus the Christian religion in France was, as a matter of fact, so completely overthrown between the years 1793 and 1798, that Napoleon himself could not re-introduce it without opposition and difficulty, without, in the interval, any desire for a substitute, in Feuerbach's sense, making itself felt.

Feuerbach's idealism consists in this, that he does not simply take for granted the mutual and reciprocal feelings of men for one another such as sexual love, friendship, compassion, self-sacrifice, etc., but declares that they would come to their full realization for the first time as soon as they were consecrated under the name of religion. The main fact for him is not that these purely human relations exist, but that they will be conceived of as the new true religion. They will be fully realized for the first time if they are stamped as religions. Religion is derived from "religare" and means originally "fastening." Therefore, every bond between men is religion. Such etymological artifices are the last resort of the idealistic philosophy. Not what the word means according to the historical development of its true significance, but what it should mean according to its derivation is what counts, and so sex-love and the intercourse between the sexes is consecrated as a "religion" only so that the word religion, which is dear to the mind of the idealist, shall not vanish from the language. The Parisian reformer of the stripe of Louis Blanc used to speak just in the same way in the forties, for they could only conceive of a man without religion as a monster, and used to say to us "Atheism, then, is your religion."

If Feuerbach wants to place true religion upon the basis of real materialistic philosophy, that would be just the same as conceiving of modern chemistry as true alchemy. If religion can exist without its God then alchemy can exist without its philosopher's stone. There exists, by the way, a very close connection between alchemy and religion. The philosopher's stone has many properties of the old gods, and the Egyptian-Greek alchemists of the first two centuries of our era have had their hands in the development of Christian doctrines, as Kopp and Berthelot prove.

Feuerbach's declaration that the periods of man's development are only differentiated through changes in religion is false. Great historical points of departure are coincident with religious changes only as far as the three world-religions which exist up to the present are concerned—Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. The old tribal and national religions originating in nature were not propagandist and lost all power of resistance as soon as the independence of the tribe and people was destroyed. Among the Germans simple contact with the decaying Roman Empire and the Christian world-religion springing from it and suitable to its economic, political and ideal circumstances, was sufficient. In the first place, as regards these more or less artificial world-religions, particularly in the cases of Christianity and Mohammedanism, we find that the more universal historical movements will take on a religious stamp, and as far as concerns Christianity in particular, the stamp of the religion affecting revolutionary movements of universal significance stopped short at the commencement of the fight of the bourgeois for emancipation from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and showed itself not as Feuerbach declares in the hearts of men and the thirst for religion, but in the entire earlier history of the Middle Ages which knew no other form of idealism than religion and theology. But as the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century was sufficiently strong to have its own ideology suitable to its own standpoint, it forthwith made its great and final revolution, the French, by means of an appeal exclusively to juristic and political ideals, and troubled itself with religion only so far as it stood in its way. It never occurred to it to establish a new religion in place of the old one; everybody knows what a mess Robespierre made of the attempt.

The possibility of a purely humane sentiment in intercourse with other men is with us today exceedingly impeded through the society founded on class antagonism and class supremacy in which we must move. We have no need to trouble ourselves about sanctifying these sentiments by means of a new religion. And just as the circumstances of the great historical class-fight have been obscured by the current historians, particularly in Germany, so in the same way the understanding of the great historical class-conflicts is sufficiently obscured by the present-day manner of writing history, without our needing to change these conflicts into a mere appendix of ecclesiastical history. Here it is evident how far we in our day are away from Feuerbach. His most beautiful passages in praise of the new religion of love are today unreadable.

The only religion which Feuerbach examined closely is Christianity, the universal religion of the western world which is founded upon monotheism. He proves that the Christian God is only the fantastic reflection, the reflected image of man. But that God is himself the product of a lengthy process of abstraction, the concentrated quintessence of the earlier tribal and national gods. And man also whose reflection that God is, is not a real man, but is likewise the quintessence of many real men, the abstract human, and therefore himself again the creature of thought. The same Feuerbach who on each page preaches sensation, diving into the concrete, the real, becomes thoroughly abstract as soon as he begins to talk of more than mere sensual intercourse between human beings.

Of this relationship only one side appeals to him, the moral, and Feuerbach's astonishing lack of resources as compared with Hegel is striking. The ethic or rather moral doctrine of the latter, is the Philosophy of Right and embraces: 1, Abstract Right; 2, Morality; 3, Moral Conduct, under which are again comprised: the family, bourgeois, society, and the State. As the form is here idealistic, the content is realistic. The entire scope of law, economy, politics, is therein, besides ethics. With Feuerbach, it is just the reverse. He is realistic in form; he begins with man, but the discussion has absolutely nothing to do with the world in which this man lives, and so, instead of the man, stands an abstract man, who preaches sermons concerning the philosophy of religion. This man is not even the son of a mother; he has developed from the God of the monotheistic religions. He does not live in real historic conditions and the world of history. He comes into relationship with other men, but each of the others is just as much an abstraction as he himself is. In the "philosophy of religion" we had still men and women, but in the "ethic" this final distinction vanishes. At long intervals Feuerbach makes such statements as: "A man thinks differently in a palace than in a hut." "When you have nothing in your body to ward off hunger and misery, you have nothing in your head, mind and heart for morality." "Politics must be our religion," etc. But Feuerbach was absolutely incapable of extracting any meaning from these remarks; they remain purely literary expressions, and Starcke himself is obliged to admit that the science of politics was an insuperable obstacle to Feuerbach and the science of society, sociology, for him a terra incognita.

He appears just as uninspired in comparison with Hegel in his treatment of the antithesis of good and evil. "One thinks he is saying something great," Hegel remarks "if one says that mankind is by nature good, but it is forgotten that one says something far greater in the words 'man is by nature evil.'" According to Hegel, evil is the form in which the mechanical power of evolution shows itself, and indeed in this lies the double idea that each new step forward appears as an outrage against a sacred thing, as rebellion against the old, dying, but through custom, sanctified, circumstances, and on the other hand that since the rising of class antagonism, the evil passions of men, greed and imperiousness serve as the levers of historical progress, of which, for example, the history of feudalism and the bourgeoisie affords a conspicuous proof. But Feuerbach does not trouble himself to examine the role of moral evil. History is to him a particularly barren and unwonted field. Even his statement, "Man as he sprang from nature originally was only a mere creature, not a man." "Man is a product of human society, of education, and of history." Even this statement remains from his standpoint absolutely unproductive.

What Feuerbach communicates to us respecting morals must therefore be exceedingly narrow. The desire for happiness is born within man and must hence be the foundation of all morality. But the desire for happiness is limited in two ways; first, through the natural results of our acts; after the dissipation comes the headache, as a result of habitual excess, sickness; in the second place, through its results upon society, if we do not respect the similar desire for happiness on the part of other people, they resist us and spoil our pursuit of happiness. It follows, therefore, that in order to enjoy our pursuit of happiness, the result of our acts must be rightly appreciated, and, on the other hand, must allow of the carrying out of the same acts on the part of others. Practical self-control with regard to ourselves and love, always love, in our intercourse with others are therefore the foundation rules of Feuerbach's morality, from which all others lead, and neither the enthusiastic periods of Feuerbach nor the loud praises of Starcke can set off the thinness and flatness of this pair of utterances.

The desire for happiness contents itself only very exceptionally, and by no means to the profit of one's self or other people with self. But it requires the outside world—means of satisfying itself—therefore means of subsistence, an individual of the other sex, books, convention, argument, activity, these means and matters of satisfaction are matters of utility and labor. Feuerbach's system of morality either predicates that these means and matters of satisfaction are given to every man per se, or, since it gives him only unpractical advice, is not worth a jot to the people who are without these means. And this Feuerbach himself shows clearly in forcible words, "One thinks differently in a palace than in a hut." "Where owing to misery and hunger you have no material in your body, you have also no material in your head, mind and heart for morals."