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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