by Simon Smith
Feuerbach’s Radical Critique: Unpacking the Dialectic
Thus far, we have seen the
development of consciousness as religious consciousness: a dialectic reflecting
on the co-constitution of itself, its own essential sociality. We have also
seen how that reflection reveals a fundamental disharmony between the self and
the other inside, a disunion between who I am and who I ought to be. This is
the creative insecurity, Kierkegaard’s five thousand fathoms of doubt, which
drives the dialectic of religious consciousness onward and upward, transforming
religion into onto-theology, speculative philosophy, before delivering
consciousness into the hands of modern materialism and all its abstract
metaphysical constructs.
Atheism, ho!
Step 2: Theology & Philosophy
Theology sees religious
consciousness cast out of the Garden of Eden. The self no longer recognises
itself as a participant, still less a constituent, of the primal dialogue, I and Thou. The dialogue is still the ground of my Being, but it’s no
longer who I am. It is only who ought to be and consequently who I am not. By objectifying the dialogue, theology alienates the self
from its natural context, transforming it into a separate, subjective, limited,
and contingent being: the object of a real, which is to say, necessary, Being.[1]
Re-framing the
divine Other as Objective Subject, forces religious consciousness to
acknowledge the anthropic implications of its projection: the personal
predicates at work in our thought and talk about God no longer represent
objective truths about personal being. If they did, they would belong to the
self, necessarily; but a self that ought to possess such qualities
obviously can’t possess them necessarily. The personal God, therefore, appears
as an anthropomorphism; its qualities: expressions of subjectivity, nothing but reflections of finitude and
contingency.
The predicates will have to go.
So begins an act of intellectual
purification: in Feuerbach’s words, the “abstraction from all that is sensuous
and material”[2]
about the believer’s conception of God, the purging of all religion’s
“subjective” content, the better to isolate the “true” or “objective” grounds
of conscious existence.
It seems
possible, if not probable, that the classical doctrine Contemptus Mundi is at work in all this. Exorcising the temptations
and contaminations of finitude, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer: “the
World, the Flesh, and the Devil.”
Theologically,
that may be so; Feuerbach, however, walks a more strictly philosophical path.
By purging the project of anthropomorphism, he sees religious
consciousness as striving to meet the realist conditions of its own
objectification. The move is a tentative one at first: the divine predicates
are not rejected absolutely but merely
distinguished from the divine subject. In this way, the consciousness that
negates itself may still reclaim itself as a reflection of Necessary Being,
relocate its own contingent being within the charter of an Objective Subject.
That way, theology resists the fullest implications of its necessitarian
demands. Apparently, theology wants to have its ontological cake and eat it.
Under the austere gaze of
speculative philosophy, however, theology will find that there is no cake.
Mere distinction is not enough:
the personal predicates from which God-talk is arises must be stripped away
completely. No vestige of subjectivity
must remain if we are to encounter the Real Being of God.
This acid
rejection of personal predicates – and cake – forces consciousness into an
ontological crisis. Apart from some predicable possibility, Being remains
logically underdetermined. Entity is a presupposition of recognisable, describable identity. Sans identity, the presupposition is
cast adrift without the logical anchor of that which it’s supposed to
presuppose. In abstraction from any recognisable mode of existence, being-just-being-itself – the ground of being –
lacks particular instantiation: it –
whatever it is – is not this, that, or any other thing. Necessary Being is nothing but an empty construct.
Logically
dubious and descriptively threadbare, the Objective Subject is pragmatically
disastrous. Since it offers no distinguishable existence, there can be no real
relation. Being isolated from particular effect means Necessary Being is
isolated from the particular “effect”
that is the finite self. But a God who’s isolated from us, “who does not
trouble himself about us, who does not hear our prayers, who does not see us
and love us, is no God.”[3]
In the end,
Necessary Being has neither moral nor psychological purchase to offer. Breaking
the ontological tension here leaves consciousness with a deceptively simple
dichotomy. Take refuge in the illusions of Necessary Being; or confine itself to the
narrowing limits of self-separating, contingent “being,” the isolation of
consciousness: being as a limited, finite individual.
And this is where the story really starts!
[1]
See Essence of Christianity, 29-30.
[2] Principles of the Philosophy of the Future,
13.
[3]
Essence of Christianity, 213.
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