Ludwig Feuerbach: Man

“The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man … that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 101-102
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

“The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 99
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Love , Knowledge , Light , Heart

“God, I have said, is the fulfiller, or the reality, of the human desires for happiness, perfection, and immortality. From this it may be inferred that to deprive man of God is to tear the heart out of his breast. But I contest the premises from which religion and theology deduce the necessity and existence of God, or of immortality, which is the same thing. I maintain that desires which are fulfilled only in the imagination, or from which the existence of an imaginary being is deduced, are imaginary desires, and not the real desires of the human heart; I maintain that the limitations which the religious imagination annuls in the idea of God or immortality, are necessary determinations of the human essence, which cannot be dissociated from it, and therefore no limitations at all, except precisely in man’s imagination.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

God , Religion , Imagination , Idea

“To be sure, the human individual can, even must, feel and know himself to be limited—and this is what distinguishes him from the animal—but he can become conscious of his limits, his finite-ness, only because he can make the perfection and infinity of his species the object either of his feeling, conscience, or thought. But if his limitations appear to him as emanating from the species, this can only be due to his delusion that he is identical with the species, a delusion intimately linked with the individual’s love of ease, lethargy, vanity, and selfishness; for a limit which I know to be mine alone, humiliates, shames, and disquiets me. Hence, in order to free myself of this feeling of shame, this uneasiness, I make the limits of my individuality the limits of man’s being itself. What is incomprehensible to me is incomprehensible to others; why should this worry me at all? It is not due to any fault of mine or of my understanding: the cause lies in the understanding of the species itself. But it is a folly, a ludicrous and frivolous folly to designate that which constitutes the nature of man and the absolute nature of the individual, the essence of the species, as finite and limited.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 103-104
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Love , Feeling , Understanding , Nature

“I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Preface to Second Edition (1843)
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Truth , Reality , Universe

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Life , God , Faith , Imagination

“God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Lecture XX, see [Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Harper & Row, New York, 1967, 187, Transl. Ralph Manheim] German: [Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, Wigand, Leipzig, 1851, 241]
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

God

“Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Lecture V, R. Manheim, trans. (1967), pp. 35-36
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Hate , Religion , Hope , Nature

“But like the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and absolute perfection is merely an imaginary desire; and, as history and daily experience prove, the supposed human striving for unlimited knowledge and perfection is a myth. Man has no desire to know everything; he only wants to know the things to which he is particularly drawn.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Life , History , Knowledge , Perfection

“Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Life , Death , Disappointment , Imagination

“Pantheism makes God into a present, real, and material being; empiricism – to which rationalism also belongs – makes God into an absent, remote, unreal, and negative being. Empiricism does not deny God existence, but denies him all positive determinations, because their content is supposed to be only finite and empirical; the infinite cannot, therefore, be an object for man. But the more determinations I deny to a being, the more do I cut it of[ from myself, and the less power and influence do I concede to it over me, the freer do I make myself of it. The more qualities I possess, the more I am for others, and the greater is the extent of my influence and effects. And the more one is, the more one is known to others. Hence, each negation of an attribute of God is a partial atheism, a sphere of godlessness.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Part I, Section 16
Principles of Philosophy of the Future http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm (1843)

God

“What man calls Absolute Being, his God, is his own being. The power of the object over him is therefore the power of his own being. Thus, the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of reason is the power of reason itself; and the power of the object of will is the power of will itself.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 102
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

God , Feeling

“Speculative philosophy as the realisation of God is the positing of God, and at the same time his cancellation or negation; theism and at the same time atheism: for God – in the sense of theology – is God only as long as he is taken to be a being distinguished from and independent of the being of man as well as of nature. The theism that as the positing of God is simultaneously his negation or, conversely, as the negation of God equally his affirmation, is pantheism. Theological theism – that is, theism properly speaking – is nothing other than imaginary pantheism which itself is nothing other than real and true theism.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Part I, Section 14
Principles of Philosophy of the Future http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm (1843)

God , Nature , Sense , Time

“Just as when a man commits suicide ne negates the body, this rational limit of subjectivity, so when he lapses into fantastic and trascendental practice he associates himself with embodied divine and ghostly appearances, namely, he negates in practise the difference between imagination and perception.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Part III, Section 29
Principles of Philosophy of the Future http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm (1843)

Imagination , Suicide , Appearance

“Man is what he eats.”

Ludwig Feuerbach

Der Mensch ist, was er ißt.
Die Naturwissenschaft und die Revolution [Natural science and the revolution] (1850), repeated in Das Geheimnis des Opfers, ober der Mensch ist was er ißt http://books.google.com/books?id=QYINAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1 [The Mystery of Sacrifice, or Man is What He Eats] (1862)

“To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

The Essence of Christianity (1841)

God