Feuerbach Quotes

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. [These words are also inscribed upon his grave]

As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.

I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.

The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.

The idea of God is the ignorance which solves all doubt by repressing it.

[T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred

To theology, ... only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred.

The task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of God – the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.

As individuals express their life, so they are.

Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men.

The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life

[Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.

Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the “active aspect” of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.

If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

A circle in a straight line is the mathematical symbol of miracle.

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.

The essence of faith … is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists[.]

To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity or unhappiness.

Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.

[T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.

The law holds man in bondage; love makes him free.

One has to 'leave philosophy aside,' one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality . . . Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love.

Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are to a greater extent governed by material forces.

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.

To every religion the gods of other religions are only notions concerning God, but its own conception of God is to it God himself, the true God.

In the object which he contemplates … man becomes acquainted with himself.

[L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; … it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself.

Feuerbach said, ‘I would rather be a devil in alliance with the truth than an angel in alliance with the falsehood.

Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked. He says, ‘Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this, its natural character, it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural significance.’ Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world.

The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; … in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.

Each planet has its own sun. … [I]t really is another sun on Uranus … The relation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature … Hence each planet has in its sun the mirror of its own nature.

That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it. In

Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature – qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.

Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity. Not because … God is love, but because of his love, of the predicate, … ; thus love is a higher power and truth[.] Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty. … [W]hat sort of love was that? … [I]t was love to man. … [T]hough there is … a self-interested love among men, still true human love … is that which impels the sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our saviour … ? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism.

By the word materialism, the philistine understands gluttony, drunkenness, lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, arrogance, cupidity, avarice, covetousness, profit-hunting, and stock-exchange swindling — in short, all the filthy vices in which he himself indulges in private. By the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal philanthropy, and in a general way a “better world”, of which he boasts before others but in which he himself at the utmost believes only so long as he is having the blues or is going through the bankruptcy consequent upon his customary “materialist” excesses. It is then that he sings his favorite song, What is man? — Half beast, half angel.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various way; the point, however, is to change it

Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it

Wherever this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained mastery of faith.

[M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.]

[T]o a limited being its limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation; on the contrary, it is perfectly happy and contented with this understanding[.]

[T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]

Whatever kind of object … we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature[.]

We know the man by the object[.] Even the moon, the sun, stars, … [t]hat he sees them is an evidence of his own nature.

God as God is feeling … yet shut up, hidden; … Christ is the unclosed, open feeling of the heart. … Christ is the joyful certainty of feeling that its wishes hidden in God have truth and reality, the actual victory over death, over all the powers of the world and Nature, the resurrection no longer merely hoped for, but already accomplished; … the Godhead made visible.

Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?

Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. … God is … infinite, man … finite … ; God … perfect, man imperfect; … God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful.

[S]o much worth … a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man, his God; the two are identical.

But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” —Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition 
of The Essence of Christianity

The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.

Nature is precisely what separates man from God … [R]eligion believes that one day this wall of separation will fall away. One day there will be no Nature, no matter, no body, at least none such as to separate man from God: then there will be only God[.]

Of course, the champions of totalitarianism protest that what they want to abolish is "only economic freedom" and that all "other freedoms" will remain untouched. But freedom is indivisible. The distinction between an economic sphere of human life and activity and a noneconomic sphere is the worst of their fallacies. If an omnipotent authority has the power to assign to every individual the tasks he has to perform, nothing that can be called freedom and autonomy is left to him. He has only the choice between strict obedience and death by starvation.1 Committees of experts may be called to advise the planning authority whether or not a young man should be given the opportunity to prepare himself for and to work in an intellectual or artistic field. But such an arrangement can merely rear disciples committed to the parrotIike repetition of the ideas of the preceding generation. It would bar innovators who disagree with the accepted ways of thought. No innovation would ever have been accomplished if its originator had been in need of an authorization by those from whose doctrines and methods he wanted to deviate. Hegel would not have ordained Schopenhauer or Feuerbach, nor would Professor Rau have ordained Marx or Carl Menger. If the supreme planning board is ultimately to determine which books are to be printed, who is to experiment in the laboratories and who is to paint or to sculpture, and which alterations in technological methods should be undertaken, there will be neither improvement nor progress. Individual man will become a pawn in the hands of the rulers, who in their "social engineering" will handle him as engineers handle the stuff of which they construct buildings, bridges, and machines. In every sphere of human activity an innovation is a challenge not only to ali routinists and to the experts and practitioners of traditional methods but even more to those who have in the past themselves been innovators. It meets at the beginning chiefly stubborn opposition. Such obstacles can be overcome in a society where there is economic freedom. They are insurmountable in a socialist system.

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. In the contrary case, I have no criterion of the moral and immoral, but merely an unmoral, arbitrary basis, from which I may deduce anything I please. Thus, if I would found morality on God, I must first of all place it in God: for Morality, Right, in short, all substantial relations, have their only basis in themselves, can only have a real foundation—such as truth demands—when they are thus based. (…) Where man is in earnest about ethics, they have in themselves the validity of a divine power. If morality has no foundation in itself, there is no inherent necessity for morality; morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion.

So here again we may clearly observe the contrast with the Enlightenment, with which individual commentators have tried to associate Nietzsche because of his atheism. In the Enlightenment, the idea was to prove that belief in God might not signify any kind of moral imperative for mankind, that the moral laws would operate in a society of atheists just as much as in one where religious patronage held sway. Nietzsche, on the contrary, wanted to show that the demise of the idea of God (or the death of God) would entail a moral renaissance in the sense we have noted above. Apart, therefore, from the other ethical contradictions in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Enlightenment, about which we again already know Nietzsche’s opinion, we find another contrast here in respect of the socio-ethical role of religion. The ‘old’ Enlightenment regarded the religious concept as irrelevant to men’s morality, actions, views etc., which in reality were adequately determined by a combination of society and men’s reason. On the other hand, Nietzsche — and here he far exceeded all Feuerbach’s weaknesses in the realm of historico-philosophical idealism — regarded the switch to atheism as a turning point for morality. (At this point let us just briefly remark that here Nietzsche’s worldview is very close to certain tendencies in Dostoievsky.)

Many gnostics, then, would have agreed in principle with Ludwig Feuerbach, the nineteenth-century psychologist, that “theology is really anthropology” (the term derives, of course, from anthropos, and means “study of humanity”). For gnostics, exploring the psyche became explicitly what it is for many people today implicitly—a religious quest. Some who seek their own interior direction, like the radical gnostics, reject religious institutions as a hindrance to their progress. Others, like the Valentinians, willingly participate in them, although they regard the church more as an instrument of their own self-discovery than as the necessary “ark of salvation.

The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects [Objekte], differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche] activity.

Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche). Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs. In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did.

Karl Marx’s early (1844) essay On the Jewish Question is a fascinating example of an intellectual form of Jewish self-hatred. He argues that Judaism is neither religion nor people-hood but the desire for gain; totally ignoring the vast Jewish proletariat of Central and Eastern Europe, he equates Jews, and the Christians whose religion derives from them, with the ‘enemy’ – namely, bourgeois capitalism. Clearly, he is fleeing his own Jewish identity (he was baptized at the age of 6, but was descended from rabbis on both sides of the family), ‘assimilating’ to the cultural milieu of the anti-Semitic Feuerbach, whose perverse definition of Judaism he has adopted, and finding refuge from Jewish particularism in socialist universalism.

aussi incontournable. Dans le récit de Foucault en effet, l’entreprise anthropologique se conçoit d’emblée comme une réponse à l’injonction critique. Feuerbach et Dilthey répondent à Kant par une « humanisation » de ces catégories a priori que l’auteur des trois Critiques avait construites à partir des seuls repères de la logique et de la grammaire. Mais l’originaire ou l’essentiel peuvent-ils jouer le rôle d’un transcendantal ? Y a-t-il, dans l’exploration qui entend faire retour vers l’homme originaire, assez pour servir de fondement à l’objectivité scientifique ? La norme d’une essence humaine peut-elle servir de condition de possibilité de la connaissance de l’homme ? On voit aussitôt la circularité : l’homme vrai est la condition de possibilité de la connaissance de l’homme vrai.

Faith in the power of prayer … is … faith in miraculous power; and faith in miracles is … the essence of faith in general. … [F]aith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason, … The specific object of faith, therefore, is miracle; … To faith nothing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith[.]

The link established by Christian theology between oikonomia and history is crucial to an understanding of Western philosophy of history. In particular, it is possible to say that the concept of history in German idealism, from Hegel to Schelling and even up to Feuerbach, is nothing besides an attempt to think the “economic” link between the process of divine revelation and history (adopting Schelling’s terms, which we have quoted earlier, the “co-belonging” of theology and oikonomia). It is curious that when the Hegelian Left breaks with this theological concept, it can do so only on condition that the economy in a modern sense, which is to say, the historical self-production of man, is placed at the center of the historical process. In this sense, the Hegelian Left replaces divine economy with a purely human economy.

Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. … [S]peculations and controversies concerning the personality or impersonality of God are therefore fruitless, idle, uncritical … ; … they in truth speculate only concerning themselves, only in the interest of their own instinct of self-preservation[.]

[I]t implies great force of subjectivity to accept as certain something in contradiction with rational, normal experience. … Wishes own no restraint, no law, no time; they would be fulfilled without delay on the instant. And behold! miracle is as rapid as a wish is impatient. … [I]t is not in its product or object that miraculous agency is distinguished from the agency of Nature and reason, but only in its mode and process; … The power of miracle is … the power of the imagination.

Because of … this concentration of all that is universal and real in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; whereas the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings, because humanity is only an abstraction; … God is … a subject; … the perfect universal being as one being, the infinite extension of the species as an all-comprehending unity. But God is only man's intuition of his own nature; thus the Christians … deify the human individual, make him the absolute being.

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

True love is sufficient to itself; it needs no special title, no authority … [I]t is … the original source of love, out of which the love of Christ himself arose. … Are we to love each other because Christ loved us? Such love would be an affected, imitative love. Can we truly love each other only if we love Christ? … Shall I love Christ more than mankind? Is not such love a chimerical love? … What ennobled Christ was love; … he was not the proprietor of love … The idea of love is an independent idea: I do not first deduce it from the life of Christ; on the contrary, I revere that life only because I find it accordant with the … idea of love.

The idea of man as a species, and with it the significance of the life of the species, of humanity as a whole, vanished as Christianity became dominant. Herein we have … confirmation … that Christianity does not contain within itself the principle of culture. Where man immediately identifies the species with the individual, and posits this identity as his highest being, as God, where the idea of humanity is thus an object to him only as the idea of the Godhead, there the need of culture has vanished; man has all in himself, all in his God, consequently he has no need to supply his own deficiencies by others as the representatives of the species, or by the contemplation of the world generally; and this need alone is the spring of culture.

Faith gives man a peculiar sense of his own dignity … The believer finds himself distinguished above other men, exalted above natural man … Because faith represents man's own nature as that of another being, the believer does not contemplate his dignity immediately in himself, but in this supposed distinct person. … [H]is own desire of honour is satisfied in the honour of his Lord. Faith is arrogant, but it is distinguished from natural arrogance in this, that it clothes its feelings of superiority, its pride, in the idea of another person … This distinctive person, however, is simply its own hidden self[.]

The logic of hell is nothing other than the logic of human free will, in so far as this is identical with freedom of choice. The theological argument runs as follows: “God, whose being is love, preserves our human freedom, for freedom is the condition of love. Although God’s love goes, and has gone, to the uttermost, plumbing the depth of hell, the possibility remains for each human being of a final rejection of God, and so of eternal life.” Let us gather some arguments against this logic of hell. The first conclusion, it seems to me, is that it is inhumane, for there are not many people who can enjoy free will where their eternal fate in heaven or hell is concerned. Anyone who faces men and women with the choice of heaven or hell, does not merely expect too much of them. It leaves them in a state of uncertainty, because we cannot base the assurance of our salvation on the shaky ground of our own decision. Is the presupposition of this logic of hell perhaps an illusion—the presupposition that it all depends on the human beings’ free will? The logic of hell seems to me not merely inhumane but also extremely atheistic: here the human being in his freedom of choice is his own lord and god. His own will is his heaven—or his hell. God is merely the accessory who puts that will into effect. If I decide for heaven, God must put me there; if I decide for hell, he has to leave me there. If God has to abide by our free decision, then we can do with him what we like. Is that “the love of God?” Free human beings forge their own happiness and are their own executioners. They do not just dispose over their lives here; they decide on their eternal destinies as well. So they have no need of any God at all. After God has perhaps created us free as we are, he leaves us to our fate. Carried to this ultimate conclusion, the logic of hell is secular humanism, as Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche already perceived a long time ago. The Christian doctrine of hell is to be found in the gospel of Christ’s descent into hell. In the crucified Christ we see what hell is, because through him it has been overcome. Judgment is not God’s last word. Judgment established in the world the divine righteousness on which the new creation is to be built. But God’s last word is “Behold I make all things new” (Rev 21: 5). From this no one is excluded. Love is God’s compassion with the lost. Transforming grace is God’s punishment for sinners. It is not the right to choose that defines the reality of human freedom. It is the doing of the good.

A Hegelian might then argue that this indeterminacy of being is precisely the point: it is only when being becomes something via social interchange that it is conceptually significant. Hegel's conception would seem compatible with an essentially left-wing conception of the centrality of social and political perspectives, rather than merely philosophical ones. Why, then, do Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians come to oppose Hegel? For the most significant German thinkers after Hegel, from Feuerbach, to Nietzsche, Heidegger and Habermas himself, the very understanding of the task of philosophy in modernity becomes an issue because of the demise of Hegel's emphatic conception of the status of philosophy. If philosophy no longer can, or should, play a decisive systematizing role in modernity, what are the alternatives for dealing with what had formerly been seen as philosophical issues? One way of considering the perceived dangers of Hegel's approach to philosophy is in sociopolitical terms. The idea is that Hegel's philosophy subordinates real people to abstractions. This is precisely what Marx thinks that modern capitalism also does to them, by giving money, the abstract medium through which value is exchanged in society, precedence over people.

We are what we eat.

I cannot so abstract myself from myself as to judge myself … ; another has an impartial judgement; through him I correct, complete, extend my own judgement, my own taste, my own knowledge.

That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another; it can be conceived otherwise; it is an accidental, merely subjective view.

If I know not now what and how I shall be; if there is an essential, absolute difference between my future and my present; neither shall I then know what and how I was before, the unity of consciousness is at an end, personal identity is abolished, another being will appear in my place; and thus my future existence is not in fact distinguished from non-existence. If, on the other hand, there is no essential difference, the future is to me an object that may be defined and known[:] … I am the substance which connects the present and the future into a unity. How then can the future be obscure to me? That which irreligious-religious reflection converts into a known image of an unknown yet certain thing, is … in the primitive, true sense of religion, not an image, but the thing itself. … The future life is nothing else than life in unison with the feeling, with the idea, which the present life contradicts. … [T]he other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish; it is only the removal of limits which here oppose themselves to the realisation of the idea. … [A]n image, a conception; still it is not the image of a remote, unknown thing, but a portrait of that which man loves and prefers before all else[:] … his soul.

[M]arriage is not holy in Christianity; … an unholy thing … excluded from heaven. … Where his heaven is, there is his heart, - heaven is his heart laid open. Heaven is nothing but the idea of the true, the good, the valid, - of that which ought to be; earth, nothing but the idea of the untrue, the unlawful, of that which ought not to be. … [T]here [in heaven] dwell only pure sexless individuals: … the Christian excludes the life of the species from his conception of the true life[.]

[H]eaven … is inconceivable, … it can only be thought of by us according to the standard of this world, a standard not applicable to any other. … It is just so with God[:] what he is, or how he exists is inscrutable.

The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life.

The future life is the feeling, the conception of freedom from those limits which here circumscribe the feeling of self, the existence of the individual. … The natural man remains at home because he finds it agreeable, because he is perfectly satisfied; religion … commences with a discontent, a disunion, forsakes its home and travels far, but only to feel … more vividly in the distance … home. In religion man separates himself from himself, but only to return always to the same point from which he set out [himself]. Man negatives himself, but only to posit himself again, and that in a glorified form: he negatives this life, but only, in the end, to posit it again in the future life.

The true Christian not only feels no need of culture, because this is a worldly principle and opposed to feeling; he also has no need of (natural) love. … God supplies to him the want of love, of a wife, of a family. … [T]he man who does not deny his manhood, is conscious that he is only part of a being, which needs another part for the making up of the whole of true humanity. The Christian, on the contrary, in his excessive, transcendental subjectivity, conceives that he is, by himself, a perfect being. But the sexual instinct runs counter to this view; it is in contradiction with his ideal: the Christian must therefore deny this instinct.

The doctrine of immortality is the final doctrine of religion; … it speaks out what it has hitherto suppressed. If elsewhere the religious soul concerns itself with the existence of another being, here it openly considers only its own existence[.]

[D]oubt, the principle of theoretic freedom, appears to me a crime. … [T]he highest crime is doubt in God, or the doubt that God exists. … [T]hat which I do not trust myself to doubt, … without feeling disturbed in my soul, without incurring guilt; that is no matter of theory, but a matter of conscience[.]

Divine grace is the power of chance beclouded with additional mystery. … Religion denies, repudiates chance, making everything dependent on God, explaining everything by means of him; … the divine will … determines or predestines some to evil and misery, others to good and happiness, has not a single positive characteristic to distinguish it from the power of chance. The mystery of the election of grace is thus the mystery of chance.

[H]eavenly personality, or the perpetuation of human personality in heaven is nothing else than personality released from all earthly encumbrances and limitations[.] [H]ere we are men, there gods[.]

The belief in the immortality of man is the belief in the divinity of man[.]

The religious man renounces the joys of this world, but only that he may win in return the joys of heaven; … and the joys of heaven are the same as those of earth, only that they are freed from the limits and contrarieties of this life. Religion thus arrives, though by a circuit, at the very goal, the goal of joy, towards which the natural man hastens in a direct line. To live in images or symbols is the essence of religion. Religion sacrifices the thing itself to the image.

The heavenly life is no other than that which is, already here below, distinguished from the merely natural life … That which the Christian excludes from himself now – for example, the sexual life – is excluded from the future: the only distinction is, that he is there free from that which he here wishes to be free from … Hence this life is, for the Christian, a life of torment and pain, because he is here still beset by a hostile power, and has to struggle with the lusts of the flesh and the assaults of the devil.

Religion annexes to its doctrines a curse and a blessing … Blessed is he that believeth, cursed is he that believeth not. Thus it appeals not to reason, but to feeling, … to the passions of hope and fear. … [T]he fear of hell urges me to believe. Even supposing my belief to be in its origin free, fear inevitably intermingles itself[.]

The more man alienates himself from Nature, the more subjective, i.e., supranatural or antinatural, is his view of things, the greater the horror he has of Nature, or at least of those natural objects and processes which displease his imagination, which affect him disagreeably.

Miracle is agreeable because … it satisfies the wishes of man without labour[.]

[I]n love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; … the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, … The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; … friendship is a means of virtue, and more: it is … dependent however on participation. … [I]t cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-contemplation. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. … However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others.

[T]he Christians abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species.

If all men were absolutely alike, … a single man would have achieved the end of the species.