Sunday 21 July 2019

Part the Second. Mirror Images: Philosophy, Feuerbach, and the Dialectics of Consciousness

by Simon Smith
Feuerbach’s Radical Critique: Unpacking the Dialectic

In the previous instalment, we set out to consider the point and purpose of philosophy. In truth, this is a question that has troubled me for some time. I have come to suspect that there isn’t one – at least as far as academic philosophy is concerned. What, one might fairly wonder, do (academic) philosophers actually do, apart from talk a load of old toot to other academic philosophers?
From this, of course, it does not follow that philosophy, per se, has neither point nor purpose, although that is also a distinct possibility. However, the unexamined life, as Socrates reminds us, is hardly worth the candle. Likewise, Feuerbach saw, in philosophy the most truly and profoundly human of all human acts. No, not eating seventy-five hotdogs in a minute. And it’s not taking pictures of other humans sans vests either. No, what Feuerbach saw in philosophy was an act of self-discovery, of self-transformation, of becoming human. Indeed, it’s not only philosophy but every attempt to understand ourselves and our universe that embodies, better, manifests the dialectic of consciousness.

Let’s take this one step at a time.

Step 1: Religion
The dialectic works like this: in the first stage, we see the “objectification,” the projecting outwards, of our true nature; what Feuerbach’s calls our “species being”.
“Species being” represents the primal determination of the self, the essence of our humanity. And that determination or essence marks the self as a social reality; consciousness, to borrow Austin Farrer’s phrase, is a “social product.”[1]
The roots of who and what we are, of all the various modalities in which personal identity is embodied, lie in the arms of those who cradled us and cared for us and taught us how to be conscious human beings in the first place. We’re made to be cared for, as John Macmurray rightly said – the psychological evidence is undeniable; the biological evidence, irrefutable (though probably a lot more fun). Simply put, selfhood does not spontaneously burst forth, like a pluke on the end of one’s nose. It is invested in us.
In particular, we’re taught to think, or more precisely to speak. Talked into talking, we learn, as Farrer put it, to “talk silently to the images of the absent, or… pretend to be our own twin, and talk to ourself.” And so we learn to think, for “[t]hought is the interiorisation of dialogue.”

From which it follows, of course, that people who do not talk to others cannot think for themselves.

In teaching us to think, those who have and hold us stake their claim to the structure of those primal transactions: they too are internalised, instilling the self with what Feuerbach called “the inner life of man.” The developing self, its needs, activities, and perspectives are refracted by, passed through, the image of the other. Being “filtered”, the self learns to evaluate and re-evaluate itself, to construct and re-construct itself, in relation to others. And so, in other words, I learn to double myself, to put myself in the place of others and re-enact that otherness. To become I, that is, the self must learn to be Thou unto others.
That, in sum, is what Feuerbach sees at the heart of religious mythology: the anthropomorphic personification of “species being,” the “inner life of man” writ large in illuminated text and reflected in the life of faith: “[t]he image of God [he said] is…the ‘mirror of man’.”[2] In that mirror, consciousness reflects back upon itself, not directly, but refracted through the idealised image of itself, the essential sociality of its nature. This image, however, destabilises the self; for, as Feuerbach put it, it “proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not.”[3]

And who wouldn’t love that?

Thus am I thrown “into strife, into disunion with myself;” thus am I compelled to confront and indeed participate in the dialectics of my own self-construction.
Philosophically speaking, consciousness conceives, i.e. enacts, itself in relation to a transcending archetype, an idealised otherness.
To the religious believer, of course, that means putting oneself in the way of God’s will, of enacting that will in the world.
Nota bene, the reduction here, insofar as there is one, is epistemological, not ontological. Contrary to popular opinion, Feuerbach’s claim is not “What God is to me, is all God is,” but simply, “[w]hat God is to me is to me all he is.”[4]  The repetition is crucial.  God can only be (for me) what God is (to me).  That means no ontological reduction, but instead a demand for psychological purchase, a recognisable predication-principle. The point of application (of truth) is the point of appropriation of the self. That is to say, in order to instantiate human being, consciousness appeals for “a being with attributes analogous to the human.” Analogous because cosmological instantiation cannot be literally predicated of God.  In short, although ostensibly “about” God, the analogate of the analogy is for us.

And this is where the story really starts!



[1] This is from Faith and Speculation, although I can't find the exact page just at the moment. If anyone is interested, drop me a line and I’ll dig it out.
[2] Volume VI, 78, Feuerbach’s Collected Works; quoted Wartofsky, 292.
[3] Essence of Christianity, 47. Cf. Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (London: Fontana, 1967), 65-66: ‘A sense of value then is as sense of lack, the lack of a certain completeness; and the reflective consciousness which reveals to us this lack (under the eye of which what we are shrivels, as it were, to nothing) is properly called a moral consciousness.’
[4] Essence of Christianity, 16; my emphasis.

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