Frankenstein's Cat.pdf - University of Cincinnati

LUDWIG FEUERBACH: THE RELIGIOUS ATHEIST
In theology things are not thought and willed because
they exist, they exist because they are thought and
willed. The world exists because God thought and
willed it, because He still thinks and wills it. The idea,
the thought, is not abstracted from the object, thought
is the author, the cause of the thought object. But this
doctrine – the core of Christian theology and philosophy
– is an inversion in which the order of nature is stood
on its head.
... man, quite rightly so from a subjective point of view
– or quite rightly at least so long as he has not understood
his own nature – sets the class or class concepts
before the species and individuals, the abstract before
the concrete ... the abstract has thus become the foundation
of the real [and] man comes to regard the being
who is nothing but a bundle of universal concepts, the
thinking spiritual being, as the first being, as the being
who precedes all other beings not only in rank but also
in time. Who is indeed the ground and cause of all being
and the Creator of all beings.
5. The Multifaceted Nature of the God Concept
Feuerbach came to these conclusions in stages, first
through his rejection of the philosophical idealism of
Hegel, then through his rejection of the God of Christianity,
and finally through his analysis of paganism and
primitive nature worship. He thus came to recognize
that philosophical idealism, from Plato to Hegel, was
in fact nothing more than crypto-theology and that
there were at least three distinct, and often mutually
contradictory, facets to the concept of God:
1.! God as moral and spiritual guide and benefactor,
i.e. as father and redeemer.
2. ! God as the external cause or creator of nature.
3. ! God as nature itself (pantheism).
! The first of these Feuerbach viewed as a reification
of idealized human attributes and thus as an extension
of the study of mankind or anthropology, whereas he
viewed the second and third as a reification of the attributes
of raw nature and thus as an extension of physics
or – to use the outdated 17th century term – of
physiology:
... as I showed in “The Essence of Christianity,” God,
considered in his moral or spiritual attributes, God as
a moral being, is nothing other than the deified and
objectified mind or spirit of man, and in the last analysis
theology is therefore nothing other than anthropology.
Accordingly, in “The Essence of Religion,” I
showed that the physical God, or God regarded solely
as the cause of nature, of the stars, trees, stones, animals,
and of man, insofar as they too are natural,
physical beings, expresses nothing other than the deified,
personified essence of nature, that the secret of
physico-theology is therefore nothing other than physics
or physiology – physiology not in its present restricted
sense, but in its old universal sense of natural
science in general. A moment ago I summed up my
doctrine by saying that theology is anthropology. I
should now like to complete that statement by saying:
anthropology and physiology.
6. God as Moral and Spiritual Guide
Feuerbach has little to say in his lectures about the first
of these interpretations, having dealt with it in great
detail in his earlier books, and contents himself instead
with pointing out that the reduction of God to an abstract
personification of idealized human values in no
way detracts from their role as standards for ethical
and moral behavior:
One of the most frequent laments heard from the religious
and learned bewailers of atheism is that it destroys
or ignores an essential need of man – the need to
revere something higher than himself, and therefore
turns man into a presumptuous egoist. But in annulling
what is above man theologically, atheism does not annul
what is ethically and naturally higher. The ethically
higher is the ideal that every man must pursue if he is
to make anything worthwhile of himself; but this ideal
is and must be a human ideal and aim.
7. God as Creator
In the second of these interpretations, Feuerbach argues
that God is abstracted from nature and set above
it, though still functioning as its cause or origin:
It is a universal doctrine in our upside-down world
that nature sprang from God, whereas we should say
the opposite, namely that God was abstracted from
nature and is merely a concept derived from it.
... all those divine predicates that are not borrowed
from man are derived from nature, so that they objectify,
represent, illustrate nothing other than the essence
of nature, or nature pure and simple. The difference
only is that God is an abstraction, that is, a mere notion,
while nature is concrete, that is, real. But the essence,
the substance, the content are the same. God is
nature in the abstract, that is, removed from physical
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