Sunday 14 July 2019

Mirror Images: Philosophy, Feuerbach, and the Dialectics of Consciousness

by Simon Smith

Ladieees and gentlemen, or vice versa. I present, for your edification and enjoyment a paper presented by me, or someone very similar, at last year’s 2018 Estonian Annual Conference of Philosophy. Thus far, it remains the only, 2018 Estonian Annual Conference of Philosophy that I have attended; although, in truth, I was impersonating myself at the time. Entitled The Utility and Futility of Philosophy, the conference was held at Tallinn University, Estonia. Everyone was perfectly charming and I had a thoroughly splendid time. So here, in revenge and approximately three parts is what I told them about Feuerbach and purpose or point of philosophy.

Introduction: is Philosophy Just Bullshit?
From a Feuerbachian perspective, searching among philosophy’s objects for a purpose is a fruitless exercise. Not because there are so few objects left – thanks to the sciences – but because it’s the wrong place to look. Those objects that do remain, present us, as Ludwig Feuerbach said, with a mere “show of philosophy” that is “no philosophy at all.”[1] Abstract essences and egos abound; yet such “self-sufficing speculation” is suitable only for the most “dull and pedantic minds.”
If you’re feeling antagonised, you’re meant to. To be understood or accepted by his peers would, I think, have been Feuerbach’s greatest failure. His “highest triumph,” by contrast, lies in the fact that, to many, his philosophy “appears to be no philosophy at all.”[2] Not surprising; his aim was a radical critique leading ultimately to “the negation of philosophy.” A laudable ambition indeed. For only that negation, insisted Feuerbach, is “the true philosophy”
The course of that critique, that negation, is generally well known. It exposed religion and theology as nothing but anthropomorphic projection. The personal character of the divine as a function or manifestation of the divine character of persons: such, Marx Wartofsky tells us, is the “fundamental human content…behind the metaphysical façade.” For neo-reformationist Karl Barth it marked the “transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.”[3]
And if that’s all there was to it, then Barth’s dismissal of Feuerbach’s critique, not as false, but as “extraordinarily, almost nauseatingly, trivial” might well be justified.

A Dialectical Negation
Fortunately, there’s considerably more to the Feuerbachian programme than that. As Charles Conti argues, Feuerbach doesn’t just reveal “the ‘mistaken’ nature of psychological inducements to use ‘gods’… based on false ‘objectifications’.”[4] What, after all, would be the point of that? The analogicality of the projection is hardly hidden from religious minds; one would need to inordinately dense to imagine that God is literally a person just like any other. Rather, Feuerbach guides us through the transliterations of religion as subconscious desire and death-anxiety.[5] Put simply, he destabilises theology, not by replacing it with a psychology of fear and desire (a la Freud and Barth) but by demythologising ordinary ego-needs, thereby revealing theology as the mirror image of a developing self-consciousness. In other words, Feuerbach’s “negation” is not reductive, but dialectical.

Consciousness Embodied
Incidentally, all this talk about consciousness and self-consciousness isn’t intended to raise the ghost of Descartes ego-isolationism. Feuerbach was utterly and vehemently opposed to all such abstract constructs. In sharp contrast to the empty idealisations of classical rationalism-cum-realism, his philosophical anthropology took its cue from the actual requirements of exploring agents, so places the emphasis on the senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Touch in particular, perhaps, because, as Austin Farrer and Stuart Hampshire both argued, touch “works through contact,” bodily resistance, thereby providing the “natural criterion of physical reality.”[6] For Feuerbach, too, the senses provide an empirical mandate: “That of which I think without sensation [he insisted] I think without and apart from all connection.”[7]  Without connection, there is no perception; and, as Wittgensteinians would doubtless remind us, sans percepts, no concepts. Reflecting back upon consciousness – in proper Feuerbachian style – means that, apart from sensory, bodily activity, consciousness remains logically and causally under-determined. In a nutshell, we are sensuous creatures, physically embodied in a physical world.
Lest our physical determination of consciousness fails to mitigate the risks of abstraction entirely, as the empirical tradition indicates it might, Wartofsky unlocks Feuerbach’s emphasis on sense and sensibility with a “much-inflated yet workaday German expression.”[8] The key, he argues, lies in understanding sensibility “not on the ‘observer’ or… ‘spectator’ model of empiricist epistemology, but in terms of a model of a being that is already involved in the world by its very nature. The context of sensation is therefore this primary involvement, this Dasein.” No neutral substrate awaiting independent designation, Dasein or “being there” denotes a mode of physicality, of activity. It is (Wartofsky tells us) “the original locus of being itself, as a spatio-temporal here and now, a concrete being here and now.”[9]

The Radical Critique
Given this, perhaps we can see why the purpose of philosophy will not be found among its objects, but among its subjects: those who seek and find. The object of a thing, as Feuerbach says, is its essence or truth. After all, actions are reflexive; in pursuing ends, they reveal agents and, crucially, the nature of agents. The pursuit of this dialectic, this negation of philosophy, is the most typically human act there is, self-revelatory par excellence. A “self-transformative critical activity,” “a process of self-discovery.”[10] According to Wartofsky, then, Feuerbach’s famous ‘nothing but’ actually represents, or better still, enacts “the ‘raising up’ of a confused and inverted consciousness to enlightenment and self-knowledge.”[11] In short, philosophy is about becoming human; and becoming human is, for Feuerbach, what it means to be human.[12]

And this is where the story really starts!



[1] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), xxxiv & xxxv.
[2] This and next: The Essence of Christianity, xxxv.
[3] Karl Barth ‘An Introductory Essay’ in The Essence of Christianity, xiv.
[4] Charles Conti, ‘God as Other (Feuerbach on the Psychology of Religion)’, 23, n56.
[5] Farrer referred to such reductive psychologising as the “art of talking oneself out of anxiety by the entertainment of unreal supposition”. See ‘A Starting-Point for the Philosophical Examination of Theological Belief’ in Faith and Logic, 9.
[6] Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983), 48; Austin Farrer, Finite and Infinite (2nd Edition. Westminster: Dacre Press 1959), 232.
[7] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, translated by M. H. Vogel (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. 1986), 52.
[8] Marx Wartofsky Feuerbach (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), 18 & 377.
[9] Wartofsky, 376.
[10] Wartofsky, vii.
[11] Wartofsky, 18
[12] Wartofsky, viii.

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