Ludwig Feuerbach on the ‘scientific’ explanation of religion


Anatomy, physiology, medicine, chemistry know nothing about the soul, God, etc. We only know about them from history.”


Indeed, after 1841, Feuerbach would plunge ever deeper into religion and mythology, not at the level of abstract theology, but at the level of concrete stories. Positivistic, natural science, in his estimation, would not answer the human questions raised by myth and religion. As Feuerbach put it in a letter to an admirer, “Anatomy, physiology, medicine, chemistry know nothing about the soul, God, etc. We only know about them from history.” While he agreed with the materialists that the human is a natural being, his main focus was “the fantastic beings and the thoughts that arise from humans.” [18] Myth and religion revealed something about humanity. The question was how to read these obscure stories, how to translate the sacred language of the high priests and formal institutions into the reality of a concrete humanity.

18 Letter to Gustav Bäuerle, May 31, 1867, in GW 21:302–3, cited in Manuela Köppe, “Zur Entstehung von Ludwig Feuerbachs Schift ‘Über Spiritualismus und Materialismus, besonders in Beziehung auf die Willensfreiheit,’” in Materialismus und Spiritualismus. Philosophie und Wissenschaften nach 1848, ed. Andreas Arndt and Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000), 43–44.

SOURCE: Caldwell, Peter C. Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe: Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Louise Dittmar, Richard Wagner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 8, 158-9.


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