I appear to be live blogging Ludwig Feuerbach. I could be watching 'Dexter'.
Chapter II: E.oC.
Was the divine a projection or a reflection? Feuerbach seemed to go for
the latter at first but by the end of the chapter the former wins out. Good,
fine, splendid but then the note of Idealism begins to nullify that. We are
it would seem encapsulated in a noetic bubble.
“But feeling has here been adduced only as an example. It is the same with
every other power, faculty, potentiality, reality, activity—the name is
indifferent—which is defined as the essential organ of any object. Whatever
is a subjective expression of a nature is simultaneously also its objective
expression. Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means
of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher
kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the
conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these
other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his
own nature—qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.”
A species then of subjective realism, a soupcon of Kant, is added to the mix.
Lack of definition and clear lines is a Romantic thing where things flow into
each other without there being an ontological basis for this blurring. As he
enters into Chap.II this is more marked. “The object of any subject is nothing else than the
subject’s own nature taken objectively.” Xenophanes said it: ‘If an
ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox’.
“ Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man,—religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.”
Here it is perfect Romantically expressed subjectivism and a neon warning
sign of the fata morgana of Idealism tinged Religion. Not so much the
unknown God of the Acropolis but the unknowable god as though the God
wrestled with by Jacob were a figment merely of florid religiosity.
He offers a morsel of religous anthropology: ‘religion is man’s earliest and also
indirect form of self-knowledge’......Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself,
before he finds it in himself’......’the object and content of the Christian religion are
altogether human’.
What is central to his misapprehension of the nature of Christianity is his
lack of understanding of the nature of analogy. The epithets applied to
God , good, wise etc. are not applied in the same sense as they are to man.
This is a commonplace in theology. Their inadequacy is well understood
and they are only offered as a bridge to contemplation and prayer. He
appears to think that because those attributes are inadequate and that only
those things that attributes can capture/signify can be granted
existence therefore God to whom attributes cannot be applies does
not exist. God is therefore the vain projection of man’s need for transcendence.
“Wherever, therefore, this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of a man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained the mastery of faith. And it is only the inconsequence of faint-heartedness and intellectual imbecility which does not proceed from this idea to the formal negation of the predicates, and from thence to the negation of the subject to which they relate.”
He seems not to distinguish between human attributes as such and attributes applied
analogically. Basic error.
