Conspectus of Feuerbach’s Book Lectures on the Essence of Religion

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The preface is dated 1. I. 1851.—Feu- erbach speaks here of the reasons why he did not take part in the 1848 revolu- tion, which had “such a shameful, such a barren end” (VII). The revolution of 1848 had no Orts- und Zeitsinn, theconstitutionalists expected freedom from the word des Herrn, the republicans				8°. R. 807
	(VII-VIII) from their desire (“it was only necessary to desire a republic for it to come into being”).... (VIII) “If a revolution breaks out again and I take an active part in it, then you can ... be sure that this revolution will be vic- torious, that Judgment Day for the mon- archy and hierarchy has arrived.” (VII)				Feuerbach did not understand the 1848 revolution

First lecture (1-11).

P. 2:	“We have had enough of political as well as philosophical idealism; we now want to be political materialists.”				Sic!!
3-4	—Why Feuerbach fled to the seclusion of the country: the break with the “gottesgläubigen Welt” p. 4
	(Z. 7 v. u. ) (cf. p. 3 in f. )—to live with “nature” (5), ablegen all “überspannten” ideas.				down with “Überspann- tes”!
7-11	Feuerbach gives an outline of his works (7-9): History of modern phi- losophy (9-11 Spinoza, Leibnitz).

Second Lecture (12-20)

12-14	—Bayle.
15:	Sinnlichkeit for me means “the true unity of the material and the spiritual, a unity not thought up and prepared, but existing, and which therefore has the same significance as				‘sensuous- ness’ in Feuerbach
	reality for me.”
	Sinnlich is not only the Magen,but also the Kopf (15).
(16-20:	Feuerbach’s work on Immortality: paraphrased.)

Third Lecture (21-30).

The objection was raised to my Essence of Christianity that for me man does not depend on anything, “there was opposition to this alleged deification of man by me.” (24) “The being, whom man presupposes ... is nothing other than nature, not your God.” (25)
	“The unconscious being of nature is for me the eternal being, without origin, the first being, but first in point of time, and not in point of rank, the physically but not morally first being....” (27)
	My denial includes also affirmation.... “It is, of course, a consequence of my doc- trine that there is no God” (29), but this follows from the conception of the essence of God (=an expression of the essence of nature, of the essence of man).

Fourth Lecture

“The feeling of dependence is the basis of religion.” (31) (“Furcht” 33-4-5-6)
	“The so-called speculative philosophers are ... those philosophers who do not con- struct their notions in accordance with things, but rather construct things accord- ing to their notions.” (31)				cf. Marx und Engels

(Fifth Lecture)

— it is especially death that arouses fear, belief in God. (41)
	“I hate the idealism that divorces man from nature; I am not ashamed of my de- pendence on nature.” (44)
	“As little as I have deified man in Wesendes Christenthums, a deification with which I have been stupidly reproached ... so little do I want to deify nature in the sense of theology....” (46-47)

Sixth Lecture

— The cult of animals (50 u. ff.).
	“What man is dependent on is ... nature, an object of the senses ... all the impressions which nature makes on man through the senses ... can become motives of religious veneration.” (55)

(Seventh Lecture.)

By egoism I understand, not the egoism of the “philistine and bourgeois” (63), but the philosophical principle of conformity with nature, with human reason, against “theological hypocrisy, religious and spec- ulative fantasy, political despotism.” (63 i. f.) Cf. 64 very important.				“egoism” and its significance
	Idem 68 i. f. and 69 i. f. — Egoism (in the philosophical sense) is the root of religion.
(70:	Die Gelehrten can only be beaten with their own weapons, i.e., by quo- tations) ... “man die Gelehrten nur durch ihre eigenen Waffen, d. h. Zitate, schlagen kann....” (70)

Incidentally, on p. 78 Feuerbach uses the expression: Energie d. h. Thätigkeit. This is worth noting. There is, indeed, a subjective moment in the concept of ener- gy, which is absent, for example, in the concept of movement. Or, more correctly, in the concept or usage in speech of the concept of ener,gy there is something that excludes objectivity. The energy of the moon (cf.) versus the movement of the moon.

on the question of the word energy

107	i. f. ...“Nature is a primordial, pri- mary and final being....”
111:	... “For me ... in philosophy ... the sensuousness is primary; but primary not merely in the sense of speculative philosophy, where the primary sig- nifies that beyond the bounds of which it is necessary to go, but primary in the sense of not being derived, of being self-existing and true.”				the sensuousness =the prima- ry, the self- existing and true
	...“The spiritual is nothing outside and without the sensuous.”
NB	in general p. 111 ... “the truth and essentiality (NB) of the senses, from which ... philosophy ... proceeds....”
112 ...	“Man thinks only by means of his sensuously existing head, reason has a firm sensuous foundation in the head, the brain, the focus of the senses.”
	See p. 112 on the veracity (Urkunden) of the senses.
114:	Nature=the primary, unableitbares, ursprüngliches Wesen.				NB˘
	“Thus, Die Grundsätze der Philosophieis interconnected with the Wesen der Re-ligion.” (113)

“I deify nothing, consequently not even nature.” (115)
116	— Answer to the reproach that Feuer- bach does not give a definition ofnature:
	“I understand by nature the total- ity of all sensuous forces, things and beings which man distinguishes from
	himself as not human.... Or, if the word is taken in practice: nature is everything that for man—indepen- dent of the supernatural whisperings				It turns out that nature= everything except the
	of theistic faith—proves to be imme- diate and sensuous, the basis and object of his life. Nature is light, electricity, magnetism, air, water, fire, earth, animal, plant, man, in-				supernatural. Feuerbach is brilliant but not profound. Engels defines
	sofar as he is a being acting involun- tarily and unconsciously—by the word ‘nature’ I understand nothing more than this, nothing mystical, nothing nebulous, nothing theological” (above: in contrast to Spinoza).				more profound- ly the distinc- tion between materialism and idealism.
	...“Nature is ... everything that you see and that is not derived from human hands and thoughts. Or if we penetrate into the anatomy of nature, nature is the being, or totality of beings and things, whose appearances, expressions or effects, in which precisely in their existence and essence are manifested and consist, have their basis not in thoughts or intentions and decisions of the will, but in astronomical, or cosmic, mechanical, chemical, physical, physiolo- gical or organic forces or causes.” (116-117)
	[Here too it amounts to opposing matter to mind, the physical to the psychical.] 121 — against the argument that there must be a prime cause (= God).
	“It is only man’s narrowness and love of convenience that cause him to put eternity in place of time, infinity in place of the endless progress from cause to cause, a stat- ic divinity in place of restless nature, eternal rest instead of eternal movement.” (121 i. f.)
124-	125 Owing to their subjective needs, men replace the concrete by the ab- stract, perception by the concept, the many by the one, the infinite Σ of causes by the single cause.
	Yet, “no objective validity and exist- ence, no existence outside ourselves” must be ascribed to these abstractions. (125)				objectiv = außer uns
	...“Nature has no beginning and no end. Everything in it is in mutual interaction, everything is relative, everything at once effect and cause, everything in it is all- sided and reciprocal....” (129)
	there is no place there for God (129-130; simple arguments against God).
	...“The cause of the first and general cause of things in the sense of the theists, theologians and so-called spec- ulative philosophers is man’s under- standing....” (130) “God is ... cause in general, the concept of cause as essence personified and become independent....” (131)
	“God is abstract nature, i.e., nature re- moved from sensuous perception, mentally conceived, made into an object or being
	of the understanding; nature in the proper sense is sensuous, real nature, as immedi- ately manifested and presented to us by the senses.” (133)				immediately
	The theists see in God the cause of the movement in nature (which they make into a dead mass or matter). (134) The power of God, however, is in reality the power ofnature (Naturmacht: 135).
	...“Indeed it is only through their effects that we perceive the properties of things....” (136)
	Atheism (136-137) abolishes neither dasmoralische Über (= das Ideal) nor dasnatürliche Über (= die Natur.)
	...“Is not time merely a form of the world, the manner in which particular beings and effects follow one another? How then can I ascribe a temporal beginning to the world?” (145)				time and world
	...“God is merely the world in thought.... The distinction between God and the world is merely the distinction between spirit and sense, thought and perception....” (146)
	God is presented as a being existing out-
	side ourselves. But is that not precisely an admission of the truth of sensuous being? Is it not (thereby) “recognised that there is no being outside sensuous being? For, apart from sensuousness, have we any other sign, any other criterion, of an exist- ence outside ourselves, of an existence in- dependent of thought?” (148)				being outside ourselves = independent of thought
	...“Nature ... in isolation from its mate- riality and corporeality ... is God....” (149)				NB nature outside, independent of matter = God
	“To derive nature from God is equivalent				NB
	to wanting to derive the original from the image, from the copy, to derive a thing				theory of ‘the copy’
	from the thought of the thing.” (149)

Characteristic of man is Verkehrtheit (149 i. f.) verselbständigen abstractions— for example, time (150) and space:
	“Although ... man has abstracted space and time from spatial and temporal things, nevertheless he presupposes those as the primary grounds and conditions of the latter’s existence. Hence he thinks of the world, i.e., the sum-total of real things, matter, the content of the world, as having its origin in space and time. Even Hegel makes matter arise not only in, but out of,
	space and time....” (150) “Also, it is really incomprehensible why time, separated from temporal things, should not be identified with God.” (151)				time outside temporal things = God
	...“In reality, exactly the opposite holds good, ...it is not things that presuppose space and time, but space and time that presuppose things, for space or extension				time and space
	presupposes something that extends, and time, movement, for time is indeed only a concept derived from movement, presup- poses something that moves. Everything is spatial and temporal....” (151-152)
	“The question whether a God has created the world ... is the question of the relation of mind to sensuousness” (152—the most important and difficult question of philos-				cf. Engels idem in Lud-wig Feuer-bach
	ophy, the whole history of philosophy turns on this question (153)—the conflict between the Stoics and the Epicureans, the Platonists and the Aristotelians, the Sceptics and the Dogmatists, in ancient philosophy; between the nominalists and				153
	realists in the Middle Ages; between the idealists and the “realists or empiricists”
	(sic! 153) in modern times.
	It depends in part on the nature of people (academic versus practical types) whether they incline to one or another philosophy.				153
	“I do not deny ... wisdom, goodness, beauty; I deny only that, as such generic notions, they are beings, whether in the shape of gods or properties of God, or as Platonic ideas, or as self-posited Hegelian concepts....” (158)—they exist only as prop- erties of men.				(materialism) contra theol- ogy and idealism (in theory)
	Another cause of belief in God: man transfers to nature the idea of his own purposive creation. Nature is purposive— ergo it was created by a rational being. (160)
	“That which man calls the purposiveness of nature and conceives as such is in real- ity nothing but the unity of the world, the harmony of cause and effect, the in- terconnection in general in which every- thing in nature exists and acts.” (161)
	..“Nor have we any grouns for imagin in the middle and 215 in theenses or organs he would also cognise more properties or things of nature. There is nothing more in the external world, in inorganic nature, than in organic nature. Man has just as many senses as are necessary for him to conceive the world in its totality, in its entirety.” (163)				If man had more senses, would he discover more things in the world? No.
important against agnosticism

168	—Against Liebig on account of the phrases about the “infinite wisdom” (of God).... [[Feuerbach and natural science!! NB. Cf. Mach and Co. today.]] [Back to top]
174-	175-178—Nature = a republican; God = a monarch. [This occurs not only once in Feuerbach!]
188-	190—God was a patriarchal monarch, and he is now a constitutional monarch: he rules, but according to laws.
	Where does spirit (Geist) come from?— ask the theists of the atheist. (196) They have too disdainful (despektierliche: 196)
	an idea of nature, too lofty an idea of spir- it (zu hohe, zu vornehme (!!) Vorstel- lung).				NB (cf. Dietz- gen)
	Even a Regierungsrath cannot be directly explained from nature. (197)				witty!
	“The spirit develops together with the body, with the senses ... it is connected with the senses ... whence the skull, whence the brain, thence also the spirit; whence an organ, thence also its functioning” ((197): cf. above (197) “the spirit is in the head”).
	“Mental activity is also a bodily activi- ty.” (197-198)				Idem Dietzgen
	The origin of the corporeal world from the
	spirit, from God, leads to the creation of the world from nothing—“for whence does the spirit get the matter, corporeal sub- stances, if not from nothing?” (199)
	...“Nature is corporeal, material, sen- suous....” (201)				nature is material
	Jakob Boehme = a “materialistictheist” (202): he deifies not only the mind but also matter. For him God is ma- terial—therein lies his mysticism. (202)				}
	...“Where the eyes and hands begin, there the gods end.” (203)
	(The theists) have “blamed matter or the inevitable necessity of na-ture ... for the evil in nature” (212)				the necessity of nature

213 in the middle and 215 in the middle “natürliche” und “bürgerliche Welt.”

a germ of historical materialism

(226):	Feuerbach says that he is ending the first part here (on nature as the basis of religion) and passing to the second part: the qualitities of the human spir- it are manifested in Geistesreligion.
(232)—	“Religion is poetry”—it can be said, for faith = fantasy. But do I (Feuer- bach) not then abolish poetry? No.
	I abolish (aufhebe) religion “only in-sofar” (Feuerbach’s italics) “as it isnot poetry, but ordinary prose.” (233)				NB

Art does not require the recognition of its works as reality. (233)
	Besides fantasy, of great importance in religion are das Gemüth (261), the prac-tical aspect (258), the search for the better, for protection, help, etc.
	(263)—In religion one seeks consolation(atheism is alleged to be trostlos).— — —
	“A concept, however, congenial to man’s self-love, is that nature does not act with immutable necessity, but that above the necessity of nature is ... a being that loves mankind.” (264) And in the nextsentence “Naturnotwendigkeit” of the falling of a stone. (264)				the necessity of nature

p. 287 twice in the middle: likewise “Notwendigkeit der Natur.”

Religion = childishness, the childhood of mankind (269), Christianity has made a god of morality, it has created a moralGod. (274)
	Religion is rudimentary education—one
	can say: “education is true religion....” (275) “However, this is ... a misuse of words, for superstitious and inhuman ideas are always linked with the word religion.” (275)				Feuerbach against misuse of the word religion
	Eulogy of education—(277).
	“Superficial view and assertion ... that religion is absolutely of no concern to life, namely to public, political life.” (281)				NB
	I would not give a farthing for a political freedom that allows man to be a slave of religion. (281)
	Religion is innate in man (“this state- ment ... simply means”) = superstition is innate in man. (283)
	“The Christian has a free cause of nature, a lord of nature, whose will, whose word, nature obeys, a God who is not bound by the so-called causal nexus, by necessity, by the chain which links effect to cause and cause
	to cause, whereas the heathen god is bound by the necessity of nature and cannot save even his favourites from the fatal necessity of dying.” (301) (Thus Feuerbach says sys-				the necessity of nature [NB]
	tematically: Notwendigkeit der Natur.)
	“The Christian, however, has a free cause because in his wishes he is not bound by the interconnection of nature, nor by the necessity of nature.” (301) ((And threetimes more on this page. Notwendig-				[NB]
	keit der Natur.))
	And p. 302: “...all the laws or natural necessities to which human existence is subjected....” (302)				[NB]
	| cf. 307: “Lauf der Natur.”

“To make nature dependent on God, means to make the world order, the necessity of nature, dependent on the will.” (312) And				[NB]
	p. 313 (above)—“Naturnotwendigkeit”!!
320:	“necessity of nature” (der Natur)...
	In religious ideas “we have ... examples- how in general man converts the subject- ive into the objective, that is to say, he makes that which exists only in his thought only in his thought, conception, imagination into something existing outside thought,				what is theobjective? (according to Feuerbach)
	conception, imagination....” (328)

“So Christians tear the spirit, the soul, of man out of his body and make this torn-out, disembodied spirit into their God.” (332)

Entleibter Geist = God

	Religion gives (332) man an ideal. Man needs an ideal, but a human ideal corres- ponding to nature and not a supernatural ideal:
	“Let our ideal be no castrated, disem- bodied, abstract being, let our ideal be the whole, real, all-sided, perfect, developed man.” (334)

Mikhailovsky’s ideal is only a vulgarised repetition of this ideal of advanced bourgeois democracy or of revolutionary bourgeois democracy.

“Man has no idea, no conception, of any other reality, of any other existence, than sensuous, physical existence....” (334)

Sinnlich physisch ((excellent equating!))

“If one is not ashamed to allow the sen- suous, corporeal world to arise from the thought and will of a spirit, if one is not
	ashamed to assert that things are not thought of because they exist, but that they exist because they are thought of;				NB
	then let one also not be ashamed to allow things to arise from the word; then let one also not be ashamed to assert that words exist not because things exist, but that things exist only because words exist.” (341-342)
	A God without the immortality of the soul of man is only a God in name:
	...“Such a God is ... the God of some rationalist natural scientists, who is noth- ing but personified nature or natural necessity, the universe, with which of course the idea of immortality is incompatible.”
349

The last (30th) lecture, pp. (358-370), could be put forward almost in its entirety as a typical example of an enlightening atheism with a socialist tint (concerning the mass that suffers want, etc., p. 365 middle), etc. Final words: it was my task to make you, my hearers,
	“from friends of God into friends of man, from men of faith into thinkers, from men of prayer into workers, from candidates for the beyond into students of this world,
	from Christians, who, as they themselves acknowledge and confess, are ‘half-beast, half-angel,’ into men, whole men” (370 end).				Feuerbach’s italics
	Next follow Additions and Notes. (371- 463)
	Here there are many details, quotations, which contain repetitions. I pass over all that. I note only the most important of that which affords some interest: the basis of morality is egoism (392). (“Love of life, interest, egoism”)... “there is
	not only a singular or personal, but also a social egoism, a family egoism, a corporation egoism, a community egoism, a patriotic egoism.” (393)				A germ of historical materialism!
	...“The good is nothing but that which corresponds to the egoism of all men....” (397)
	“One has only to cast a glance at history!
	Where does a new epoch in history begin? Only wherever an oppressed mass or major- ity makes its well-justified egoism effec- tive against the exclusive egoism of a na- tion or caste, wherever classes of men (sic!) or whole nations, by gaining victory over				NB NB A germ of historical materialism, cf. Cherny-
	the arrogant self-conceit of a patrician mi- nority, emerge into the light of historical glory out of the miserable obscurity of				shevsky
	the proletariat. So, too, the egoism of the now oppressed majority of mankind must and will obtain its rights and found a new epoch in history. It is not that the aristoc-				NB Feuerbach’s “socialism”
	racy of culture, of the spirit, must be abol- ished; no indeed! it is merely that not just a handful should be aristocrats and all others plebeians, but that all should— at least should—be cultured; it is not that property in general should be abolished; no indeed! it is merely that not just a hand- ful should have property, and all others nothing; all should have property.” (398)

These lectures were delivered from 1.XII.1848 to 2.III.1849 (Preface, p. V), and the preface to the book is dated 1.I.1851. How far, even at this time (1848-1851), had Feuerbach lagged behind Marx (The Communist Manifesto 1847, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, etc.) and Engels (1845: Lage)

Examples from the classics of the use of the words God and nature without dis- tinction. (398-399)
	Pp. 402-411—an excellent, phi-losophical (and at the same time simple and clear) explanation of the essence of religion.
	“In the final analysis, the secret of reli- gion is only the secret of the combination in one and the same being of consciousness with the unconscious, of the will with the involuntary.” (402). The Ego and the non-				NB
	Ego are inseparably connected in man. “Man does not grasp or endure the depths of his own being and therefore splits it into an 'Ego’ without a ‘non-Ego,’ which he				NB
	calls God, and a ‘non-Ego’ without an ‘Ego,’ which he calls nature.” (406)
	P. 408—an excellent quotation from Sen- eca (against the atheists) that they make nature into a god. Pray!—Work! (p. 411)
	Nature is God in religion, but nature
	as Gedankenwesen. “The secret of re- ligion is ‘the identity of the subjective and objective,’ i. e., the unity of the being				NB
	of man and nature, but as distinct from the real being of nature and mankind.” (411)
	“Human ignorance is bottomless and the human force of imagination is boundless; the power of nature deprived of its foun- dation by ignorance, and of its bounds by fantasy, is divine omnipotence.” (414)				Sehr gut!
	...“Objective essence as subjective, the essence of nature as different from nature, as human essence, the essence of man as				Sehr gut!
	different from man, as non-human essence—
	that is the divine being, that is the essence of religion, that is the secret of mysticism and speculation....” (415)				an excellent passage!

Speculation in Feuerbach = idealist philosophy. NB.

“Man separates in thought the adjective
	from the substantive, the property from the essence.... And the metaphysical God is nothing but the compendium, the total- ity of the most general properties extracted from nature, which, however, man by means of the force of imagination—and indeed in just this separation from sen- suous being, matter, nature—reconverts into an independent subject or being.”				NB profoundly correct! NB
	(417)

The same role is played by Logic ((418)— obviously Hegel is meant)—which convertsdas Sein, das Wesen into a special real- ity—“how stupid it is to want to make
	metaphysical existence into a physical one, subjective existence into an objective one, and again logical or abstract existence into an illogical real existence!” (418)				Excellent (against Hegel and idealism)
	...“‘Is there, therefore, an eternal gulf and contradiction between being and think- ing?’ Yes, but only in the mind; however in reality the contradiction has long been resolved, to be sure only in a way corres- ponding to reality and not to your school notions, and, indeed, resolved by not fewer than five senses.” (418)				beautifully said!
428:	Tout ce qui n’est pas Dieu, n’est rien, i.e., tout ce qui n’est pas Moi, n’est rien.				bien dit!
431	-435. A good quotation from Gassendi. A very good passage: especially433 God = a collection of adjectival words (without matter) about the concrete and the abstract.				NB

435 “The head is the house of representa-				NB
	tives of the universe”—and if our
	heads are stuffed with abstractions, Gattungsbegriffen, then of course we derive (ableiten) “the individual from the universal, i.e., ... nature from God.”				the individual and the uni- versal = Na- ture and God
436-	437: (Note No. 16.) I am not against constitutional monarchy, but only thedemocratic republic is “‘immediately reasonable’ as the form of state ‘cor- responding to the essence of man.’”				ha-ha!!

...“The clever manner of writing consists, among other things, in assuming that the reader also has a mind, in not expressing everything explicitly, in allowing the read- er to formulate the relations, conditions and restrictions under which alone a prop- osition is valid and can be conceived.” (447)

hits the mark!

Interesting is the answer to (Feuerbach’s) critic Professor von Schaden (448- 449) and to Schaller. (449-450-463)
	...“I do indeed expressly put nature in place of being, and man in place of think- ing,” i.e., not an abstraction, but something concrete— — —die dramatische Psycholo- gie. (449)				NB “being and nature,” “thinking and man”

That is why the term “the anthropolog- ical principle” in philosophy, used by Feuerbach and Chernyshevsky, is nar- row. Both the anthropological principle and naturalism are only inexact, weak descriptions of materialism.

“Jesuitism, the unconscious original and ideal of our speculative philosophers.” (455)				bien dit!
	“Thinking posits the discreteness of real- ity as a continuum, the infinite multiplic- ity of life as an identical singularity. Knowledge of the essential, inextinguishable difference between thought and life (or reality) is the beginning of all wisdom in thinking and living. Only the distinc- tion is here the true connection.” (458)				concerning the question of the funda- mentals of philosophical materialism
	End of Volume 8

Volume 9 = “Theogony” (1857). There does not seem to be anything of interest here, to judge from skimming over the pages. Incidentally, p. 320, Pars. 34, 36 (p. 334) and following should be read. NB Par. 36 (p. 334)—on looking through it, nothing appears to be of interest. Quo- tations, and again quotations, to confirm what Feuerbach has already said.