A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former, originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master, declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the "Old Testament" of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein Hegel's fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality on the other) should be cured. [1951] Feuerbach accordingly, in his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851), supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms of philosophic as well as historical insight--a statement to which there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan, [1952] fundamentally averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency. Feuerbach's special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They had shown many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity, and its philosophic self-contradiction; and the more astute official defenders, leaving to the less competent the task of re-vindicating miracles and prophecy and defending the indefensible, proceeded to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philosophic process which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible inner truth, in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a wider concern than Hegel's for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge of the actual, moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: "Two years have I attached myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to your philosophy. Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly opposite way: I am going to study anatomy." [1953] It may have been that what saved him from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the squirrel-cage of conformist philosophy was the personal experience which put him in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on Death and Immortality completed his alienation from the official side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker--a career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach, in the words of Strauss, "broke the double yoke in which, under Hegel, philosophy and theology still went." [1954] For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In a series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy, 1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839) he explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in the light of moral and historical criticism, before he produced his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian defence; and religion, defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of self-consciousness, [1955] is shown to be in very truth nothing else. "Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge." [1956] This of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect--philosophic atheism; and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares in his preface that "atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature." In the preliminary section on The Essence of Religion he makes his position clear once for all: "A God who has abstract predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the attribute of the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God, is God--namely the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being--for example, love, wisdom, justice--are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing.... These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they approve, they attest themselves.... The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence...." This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything "under the rude rule of egoism." [1957] Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is no more a vindication or acceptance of "rude egoism" than is the Christian formula of "God's will" a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from Feuerbach's criticism, under cover of alternate cries of "Communism" and "egoism"--a self-stultification which needs no comment--is simply one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant, philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized by resort to non-philosophical tests. "Max Stirner" (pen-name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856) carried the philosophic "egoism" of Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity rather than a force. [1958]