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Heidegger and Feuerbach

February 13, 2011 by Seth Paskin 2 Comments

Image of Ludwig Feuerbach commemorative stamp from autodidact projectThere are lots of directions one can go in investigating influences on Heidegger or uncovering ideas he appropriated and reworked in Being and Time.  Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc.  One of the more interesting might be Ludwig Feuerbach, a post-Hegelian and pre-Marxist who is most well known for a critique of Christianity (and later religion in general) in which he claims that god-hood and religion are simply projections of our own humanity and subjectivity.  Worshiping divinity is celebrating human accomplishment.

In countering abstraction and transcendence, Feuerbach turned to a view of human beings as material organisms connected to the world through body and senses, that have a sense of community and a desire for fulfillment which manifests as desires.  Ultimately he was still preoccupied with solving a problem of knowledge (epistemology) and altruism (ethics), but you can see this same structure reflected in B&T.  Heidegger's move is to treat the question of these 'facts' as ontological - which requires a different way of talking about them.

Another notion that Feuerbach introduces is the alienation of the subject from the community.  He says that focus on the subjective "I", misses the fundamental "I-Thou" relationship which part of human existence.  Love, which involves an essential I-Thou, is the defining desire of humanity, if you will and death, because it is the one shared experience, represents the last surrender of the self.  For Marx, this idea was essentially political (alienated labor) and for Buber, ethical.  I don't want to stand too firmly on this assertion, but there is something here that I imagine influenced Heidegger's idea of authenticity.  The inauthentic person is someone who is alienated from the world and hence his/her essential humanity.

Feuerbach is a challenging and influential thinker who none of us will probably ever spend much time on, but I was surprised doing a little digging how much he echos in B&T.  Check out the canonical entries for some background:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

E-notes

The Wikipedia entry has some biography but is otherwise weak and IEP doesn't even have an entry for him.  Alternatively, you can listen to this rap about the Feuerbach neighborhood in Stuttgart.

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Filed Under: Misc. Philosophical Musings Tagged With: Dasein, Ludwig Feuerbach, Martin Heidegger, philosophy blog

Comments

  1. Burl says

    February 14, 2011 at 5:54 am

    “The inauthentic person is someone who is alienated from the world and hence his/her essential humanity.” This stands in direct opposition to what the daddy of existentialism, Kierkegaard says in “The crowd is the Untruth.”

    For a very rich understanding of the ontology of subjectivity within objectivity, this article from a Canadian psychoanalyst is revealing.

    http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles/Whitehead-Process.htm

    He reinterprets ANW’s phases of the becoming of a subject (also a superject) in terms of appetite and desire. This reminds me of Panksepps SEEKING affect.

    Whitehead said that between the coming to be and the perishing of an actual occasion/entity is ‘the teleology of the universe’. That being the case, Jon Mill’s essay above is a good refinement of what constitutes the phases of the subjective experience of an actual entity.

    But for any philosophers or aspiring grad students of philosophy, I suggest a great thesis/dissertation topic (at a minimum, an article for the Journal of Process Studies):

    The phases of an actual occasion are evolutionary in essence, and self-directed to higher value (Quality). SO, replace ANWs phases of concresence with Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality with the static patterns of dynamic Quality Inorganic, Biological, Cultural, and Intellectual.

    It is, as ANW might say, a topic ‘fecund’ of possibilities, and as Pirsig would say, it is an activity of high Quality. I got this idea while looking into references for Seth – thanks, Seth.

    Reply
  2. ColmMacqueen says

    February 22, 2016 at 6:07 pm

    There definitely seems to be at least something to this… Just found this on the SEP’s entry on Feuerbach:

    “In Thoughts Feuerbach further argues that the death of finite individuals is not merely an empirical fact, but also an a priori truth that follows from a proper understanding of the relations between the infinite and the finite, and between essence and existence. Nature is the totality of finite individuals existing in distinction from one another in time and space. Since to be a finite individual is not to be any number of other individuals from which one is distinct, non-being is not only the condition of individuals before they have begun to exist and after they have ceased to do so, but also a condition in which they participate by being the determinate entities that they are. Thus, being and non-being, or life and death, are equally constitutive of the existence of finite entities throughout the entire course of their generation and destruction.”

    hmmmm. Just ordered Verso’s collection on Feuerbach to get to the bottom of this

    Reply

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