Ep. 356: Feuerbach Against Theology (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Hey all. I will be teaching my core texts in philosophy class this spring, starting in mid January. This is a great opportunity for you to read some of the most important works that we have covered on this podcast. I need to know now how many people are available for the various possible times I can offer this. So please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com class for more information. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 356 is something like should philosophy restrict itself to talking only about concrete social and material matters?

Or maybe what is religion without theology? And we read Ludwig Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future from 1843, as well as the introduction to his book the Essence of Christianity from 1841. More information about these texts and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer establishing a moral and rational relationship to my stomach contents In Madison, Wisconsin,

1:13 Seth: this is the Messiah of speculative reason.

1:16 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan dissolving God by assimilating him rationally.

1:22 Dylan: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey pointing his index finger into the eye of nothingness in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:32 Mark: Did you actually say your name Seth, or did you just say you were the Messiah?

1:35 Dylan: He just said he was the Messiah.

1:37 Seth: Okay, so that's the Messiah, all right.

1:39 Mark: That's fine.

1:40 Seth: Your singularity, in case anybody's confused by

1:43 Mark: who said it, your singularity is spread throughout. We are all one in some sense in our species being. This is a weird guy.

1:52 Wes: This is.

1:53 Mark: And we read. We assigned ourselves a lot of reading. So we already decided. We took extra long to prep for this one. And we have already decided we're going to have a second recording before even recording a note of this that we're just not going to get through everything here. I think these were recommendations. We'll thank Lawrence Dahlman, our previous guest from Marx, for pointing us saying he's the two things that most people read, and they were both in this single the Fiery Brook Selected Writings and the Essence of Christianity selection was first. So most of us started looking at that and maybe we're thinking we don't need the next one. But then actually Principles of Philosophy of the Future seemed like that was way better and we should have only done that. Is that kind of a consensus?

2:44 Seth: If we didn't even talk about the first essay, I'd be happy on read

2:49 Wes: going over the first essay again Doing my notes, I thought, oh, this isn't. It wasn't that. I thought it was bad. I just thought the second. The principles is. There's far more to it. In fact, there's too much to it. It is just.

3:01 Mark: Yes. Take two sessions. Just doing. Just getting through that.

3:05 Wes: I just. I fell in love with the very. Yeah. Kind of philosophically difficult phenomenology style philosophy of history contained in it. I just sort of.

3:16 Dylan: Why am I not surprised.

3:18 Wes: Enamored of that.

3:19 Mark: Yeah.

3:20 Wes: And maybe I'm dragging you guys along with me. There's two record. That's what happened.

3:26 Mark: There is a lot of overlap because Principles of the Philosophy of the Future before he actually gets to the philosophy of the future, which is just the end part. And he sort of sounds like a Neo, a sort of variation, a more polite Nietzsche, a Neo, a proto phenomenologist,

3:42 Dylan: a Merleau Ponty in the making.

3:44 Wes: Yes.

3:44 Mark: Yes. So many things for Merleau Ponty and Heidegger that are right in there. You know, 1843.

3:51 Seth: Can you.

3:52 Mark: Wow, that's like 80, 90 years before these. These other guys.

3:57 Seth: Yeah.

3:57 Dylan: What's the phrase that he uses that's basically having in hand.

4:02 Mark: I mean, he uses here being. I mean, that's Dasein. That's what.

4:05 Seth: Right.

4:05 Mark: Design is there being.

4:07 Dylan: Yeah, but.

4:08 Mark: And it doesn't refer specifically to humanity. He has a different point in bringing it up, but still, like. Yeah, I was kind of jumping out of my skin at that point. But yeah, the whole first half of it is about theology and what Hegel did with theology. There's some really difficult stuff in the middle about Hegel, just because Hegel's really difficult. And I think the essence of Christianity stuff was good to sort of fill out what he was talking about in that religion stuff. And actually, so here's my confession. After saying, you know, that we should have just focused on the second one.

I just found that the first one, Essence of Christianity, the entire book was available as a Librivox. And so over the past few days, I listened to the whole book as I was driving around various places, which is very repetitive and I would not recommend it to people. But I got a really good sense of how he analyzes religion, which, you know, I say a more polite Nietzsche, because Nietzsche, you know, of course, says, oh yeah, these religious people, they're despisers of life, they're despisers of the body, they're filled with resentment. I think Feuerbach shares a lot of those criticisms of existing religions, of Christianity as it exists in his Time and thinks that what the various philosophers, in trying to make religion more rational, have actually created some sort of weird hybrid.

He thinks that religion is fundamentally a primitive, a childlike way that humanity tries to come to understand itself. So what kind of gods they create in a given society shows you what they think of themselves. The Greek created these sensual, wild, you know, lots of different gods, you know, so it's sort of, I was reminded of, of Rorty's preference of polytheism because Feuerbach is actually critical of monotheism as well. If you posit there's one God who's jealous of you that says kind of where you're at as a human being, as a culture, that you are very ego focused and intolerant.

So he likes the love part of Christianity. He does not like the faith part of Christianity that says, you must believe this or you will go to hell. He thinks that like sort of the most extreme criticisms that somebody might give even today against religion as being obnoxious actually are justified if you take seriously certain things that are right there in the Christian religion. But religion as a human function, I think he thinks is something that we should not do without in fact, philosophy, the new philosophy becomes the new religion becomes the replacement of religion.

So it's far from just like, oh, just let's not talk about religion anymore. Let's just do like Marx does, social philosophy. Social philosophy is religion. And this is just a very weird view to me.

6:56 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it's essentially atheistic. But Mark, just following on your point about the first essay. I mean, I think the main takeaway from that is that, right. I think the way you put it, it's a way we come to understand ourselves. In particular, we take these properties of human beings, of the human essence, so to speak, and, or maybe phenomena in the natural world as well. But we, we take these things and we make them in their perfected version, properties of God. So God is kind, God has this virtue. God is that virtue. God is intelligent and rational.

But also, you know, if we're in a more primitive religion or an ancient Greek religion, we might take anger and turn that into a God. We might take war and turn that into a God. So he uses this word predicates over and over again because he's thinking subject, predicate, but you can think, or determination is synonymous with that. But in general, we're talking about properties. We're talking about properties of human beings as such, which gets projected into this alien external being. And this is where, right, this concept of alienation comes in, that's there in Hegel, but here again and then something that Marx will pick up on.

But we alienate ourselves in a way from our own essence by putting it into this external God and then worshiping it as something external. So I think he wants us to get us more grounded. That's kind of the project in both essays is to get away from the kind of abstraction that begins with that alienation and gets kind of most extreme in Hegel and bring us back down to earth and get us back in touch with reality and in touch with ourselves as sensuous. Right. As material particular beings in that way.

8:52 Dylan: He views religion as being a manifestation of philosophical. Both introspection and extrospection of understanding the world. Which I mean, maybe this is why you find it so weird, Mark, is that there's something about. He's making that judgment about religion from the get go that it has more in common with the activity of philosophy or natural science or psychology or anything like. Like that than it has with, for instance, political rule or other kinds of organization. You know, the whole aspect of religion that has to do with the way religion functions as an organizing factor in society as opposed to a organizing factor about the way we understand ourselves in the world. That's just completely absent from Feuerbach's understanding of religion as far as I can tell. Except it's like he, like this, just dismissed. It's like, oh well, that's like a weird kind of add on factor for it.

9:53 Mark: Let me give one quick example of what you just referred to as extrospection. And I promise I will not keep talking about the rest of this book that you did not read. But he has lots of chapters on individual aspects of the Christian religion, one of which is creation of nature just by an act of will out of nothing. Right. It's different if you're like, oh, you know, God necessarily by God's very nature gives rise to creation, gives rise to matter. There's something sort of mechanical just writing God's. But no, the way Judeo Christian tradition normally thinks of it is God just willed.

So this in effect devalues nature. Nature could just not have been there. It's just a matter of whimsical. And so, yeah, that tells you about that. Cultures, the culture that came up, their sort of arrogant view of nature. Nature is only there for our purposes, at our whims, has no intrinsic value in itself.

10:50 Wes: Yeah. And if we don't do that, if we don't turn God into this particular sort of personal Being thought of in terms of empirical qualities that we associate with ourselves and with the empirical world. And we try to do what the German idealist did. So we turn the creation. So he'll criticize Hegel in the principles essay for turning creation into sort of like a logical. Something that flows logically, right. So creation, existence flows logically from God. The concept, right. God gets associated with thought and with rationality. And it's Hegel's version, I think Feuerbach thinks of Fichte's positing.

So God must create the real world. He must create material physical existence, because that's the only way the concept gets its object. And the concept is not complete without its object. So God has to fulfill himself in creation with material things, and then famously, of course, with human beings themselves, so that God can know himself by human beings knowing themselves through knowing him, that sort of cycle. So the only way around calling it a whim, calling creation a whim, is to make it this logical. You know, I didn't make it seem like, well, God needs that for some reason and God shouldn't need anything or to make it somehow a logical extension of God, which is something that Feuerbach really dislikes.

12:26 Dylan: But in fact he takes the circle that you just described and inverts the direction. Right, Feuerbach does, you know, and turns it from God creating human beings in order to understand himself somehow as exactly the opposite is human beings creating God in order to understand themselves.

12:45 Seth: You know, Dylan, you said in paraphrasing you, he has a very particular view of religion. It's really, he's emphasizing the theological aspects of religion as opposed to the socio political or organizational aspects and even the moral aspects. Because you know, he alludes to the idea, like you said, ultimately he's going to come around to God is love. But the important thing is that the, the issue with religion from his perspective, and he is talking about Christianity, is that it's in the conception of God and it's in the fact that we have to conceive of this unbounded, limitless, omnipotent, blah, blah, blah.

And the, the issue, as he says, there's a contradiction. The contradiction is that we only can understand. We only know things. Things only exist in a determinate fashion. There's only this chair, this book. But the religious conception of God is that God is indeterminate, has no limits, has no things. So we have this thing that we can't conceive, strictly speaking, we can't really think an indeterminate being. And yet we believe that somehow that indeterminate being is the source of determinateness. And that's where he kind of starts talking about this issue, which is going to turn out to be a contradiction for Kant and Hegel and everybody else who tries to use a conception or a concept or thought to make sense of, determine or explain something determinate, which he ultimately is going to call being.

So he's trying to set up this dichotomy between idea and being. And it starts with religion, starts with the Neoplatonists.

14:41 Mark: Yeah, I get the feeling that his, this west, when we were talking, was referring to his, you know, his, his version of Hegel's phenomenology, that of moving through these different thinkers. And I see it less as one necessarily as his antithesis leads to the next, which necessarily as its corrective antithesis. But just maybe I'm not saying anything different, but like, when you try to fix this one, we just need to tweak it. Let's just make it this next thing. That's how you get to the next philosopher. It's not necessarily like it's a dialectic, seems to suggest, oh, it's throw it into the opposite.

And then it goes sort of something that goes back and forth. I see this is more of just a moderate tinkering, like, oh, you know, what you didn't realize, but what you really meant in your theory was this, you know, so like, okay, well, what you really meant in your theory was this. And then we finally get to something that is not recognizable. So it begins with kind of traditional religion. And then as philosophers come in and try to rationalize it, and ultimately Hegel, he think, you know, is sort of did the most thorough job in rationalizing it.

But actually for Hegel's idea of God as absolute spirit understanding itself, then there can't be anything negating spirit, right? There can't be matter as another thing. So that would limit spirit. If spirit is really all encompassing, if spirit is really the absolute, is really God, it has to actually include matter within it, which actually means the whole thing ends up being material. So materialism ends up being the natural consequence, if you really think it through and get it right, of what religion was pointing at all along, which is another way of saying, you know, this what we've been saying about religion, that when you say there is a God that has such and such characteristics, what you're really saying is something about the human beings around you and yourself that you sense with your senses all the time.

So we're really always in Religion, talking about matter, talking about real things. It's just that we forget that in many of the stages, even from the very first moment where we posit this thing, but we don't realize that that's really us, this God.

16:55 Wes: I see him as suggesting that the stages flow much more with a kind of necessity. So I think in sections 14 through 22, for instance, he wants to show us, and I think, as you just described, Mark, how theism devolves into pantheism and how we get kind of materialism out of that initially, but then that will transform itself into the Hegelian version of pantheism, which makes. Right, so pantheism is just Spinoza and God is nature and God is matter. So that gets flipped with Hegel into an idealistic version where, as Hegel puts it, substance becomes subject.

So the overall trajectory is towards greater and greater abstraction until everything is swallowed up in the black hole of the Hegelian concept, which, from Hegel's point of view is supposed to be right, the concrete concept. Hegel just wants to get everything back together and to unify everything. And he's at the same time trying to solve this classic philosophical problem of how it is, as subjects, conscious beings, we have access to this world, which is other, which is radically external. And it's a similar trick to. So, for instance, right.

For Berkeley, God always comes in as a way to Jerry rig this epistemological problem. For Berkeley, matter isn't good enough as an external objective reality because it involves various paradoxes, including the problem of how we could ever think that our representations truly represent. If representation is similarity, how they truly represent an external reality. So God comes in to be the one who coordinates. He puts all the ideas in our head. His activity is external reality, and it coordinates, you know, creates a public, external, shared reality for us.

It's very similar in Leibniz. It's there in Descartes as well, right. Except that God is there to make sure that our representations accord with. Correspond to external reality. So God has been this sort of epistemological linchpin or Jerry rigging. And in Hegel, it just gets really, really extreme because God has to play the role of. He's not just the guarantor of the external reality, and he's not, as in Berkeley, the just the activity that's putting it in the external reality into the heads of individual subjects. He has to somehow be that it almost, I think under Feuerbach's interpretation, it sounds like his interpretation of Hegel is that Hegel has us kind of in a simulation.

We are all just in God's head. We are all just in God's mind. And external reality is God's mind. And that's not going to be a good enough principle. We actually, we really do need this subject object distinction. We can't fully get rid of it. We end up throwing out a certain kind of baby with the bathwater. And the baby is empirical, I would call it a contingency. Right.

20:11 Dylan: But he calls it sensuousness.

20:13 Wes: Right, sensuousness. Feuerbach wants to vindicate. In some places it sounds like Moore. It sounds like Moore's argument against idealism. It's just we need some principle of mind independence and it can't be God. It's got to be the principle of mind independence has to be radically other. We can't in fact get around that. And if we make it, you know, if we make concepts supply their own objects, it doesn't work.

20:42 Dylan: I like the way you sort of summarize the various manifestations of solving the external reality, internal experience conundrum. And I think you're. I like how you sort of put those different attempts and those different philosophies on that same spectrum. It sounds right to me.

21:05 Seth: Yeah. Well, to kind of summarize what I think you're driving towards, Dylan, it's just that Feuerbach essentially, you know, accuses religion, which I just going back in my notes, he's really talking about religion that has a speculative component. So he's sort of talking about Catholicism versus Protestantism, but essentially that religion and then the philosophy that has superseded it or come after it is essentially idealistic. And it's idealistic not in the common sense of the word, but meaning it's idealism in that the idea triumphs. And there are two consequences of that.

There's a consequence of idealism is essentially the separation of human man, as he says, but human beings from themselves as the true objects of contemplation. So, you know, in religion it's. It becomes God. In the speculative philosophy that he's talking about first with Descartes and Leibniz, it's the ego, this thing that's somehow separated. And ultimately this separation creates the dichotomy between idealism and materialism or reason and the perception, whatever, and that this dichotomy ultimately is going to involve a contradiction that can't be resolved.

And so he goes to great lengths showing how this is the case for Hegel, Kant, Fichte. And you know, ultimately he's like, they're using the Same method. They're getting more and more clever at using the same method to solve a problem that it can't solve, or rather solve a problem that it is creating for itself by virtue of its presuppositions.

23:01 Dylan: Yeah, I think we should keep going. We got to keep going with the Feuerbach. But I found myself in reading it while saying, okay, you're right. The whole bit about sensuousness, about the empirical world. And there's a lot to say and uncover about what he means by sensuousness because just that word makes you think sort of just the bare fact kind of thinking. But that's not what he means by it. It's not even just sense. But the closest I got to something like an external reality. Well, I did find myself wondering, well, what about all the criticisms about why you go down this road, why you're in.

In this headspace that starts with people like Plato about the experience of the world. The true part of the world is only accessible inside our own experience, inside our own minds. And that there's that kind of through line that you get different versions of that especially through the philosophers that were just mentioned. And part of that has to do with the lack of our judgments about the world aligning with what the world is like. So there's. There's some judgment that there's something mistaken about the world. And so there's a. Feuerbach has to address that, that something about the.

The facts of the world aren't plain and that has to be addressed. And then there's also the fact, the phenomena, the experience of all these things that happen in one's mind that isn't in a straightforward way part of the sensuous world. And an obvious sort of maybe non pejorative example is mathematics. What's Feuerbach's account of mathematics going to be that makes it completely sensual or makes it sensual in that way. How do you. The numbering of magnitudes, all those problems that end up getting encountered. It's not clear how those are, what the through line is towards the sensuous that doesn't also have a big dollop of something that we'd call idealism.

25:11 Mark: I think giving a. As I think Dylan is pointing at a flavor of where he is going with this. And then yes, we need to be much more careful but. Right. The whole reason we're reading this is because it was a big influence on Marx, but yet Marx doesn't seem to retain any of this. Oh, religion is wonderful as long as you don't interpret it as everybody's Ever interpreted. As long as you actually find the origins of religion and it is a human need. And as long as you're, you know. So that he ends up, by the end of this, interpreting it as. As the social as, you know, that it is love of your fellow man.

He, you know, he brings in the Hegelian, not the master slave thing exactly. But we only know ourselves through other people's eyes, and they see us as a sensuous individual. So the Cartesian knowing of yourself is just about nothing. You're just knowing an abstract nothing. It's only. Even truth itself is social. He says man is the measure of all things because you have to be with another person. You know, as this is a very pragmatic point to actually establish a standard and point at it. So it's very much like Rorty's, you know, community of deciders.

And love ends up being smack at the center of everything. So it does seem like he set something up to say, well, hey, let's go, you know, be very practical and do some social engineering. Whether, you know, like you're John Stuart Mill or whether you're doing it in Marx's sense or some other way. You know, let's stop doing theology. You can love God by loving love by loving other people, by, you know, working toward the common good. But a matter of phenomenology, I mean, what you were getting at in terms of, like, the mathematics and things like that, right.

When he says we're going to sensuousness, we don't want to falsify experience. We don't want to. To interpret it in abstract terms. We want to flesh out people and make them live. You know, it becomes, not empiricism, not what my experience is, is colors and shapes, but it is significances. It is these social things, which would include, presumably, things of science and mathematics. It's just mathematics itself is clearly. That is an abstraction. It's an abstraction from the countability of things. But I could see him going in a Rortyan direction of saying, this is a particular social thing that we have been working on.

Not that there's nothing to say about mathematics in itself. Not that mathematics is going to be different depending on what society you live on. You know, it doesn't imply that sort of relativism, but it's just how these things relate to experience, you know, that we can't forget, even if we're doing something very abstract, its origins in raw, sensuous, real life experience with other humans.

28:04 Seth: Yeah. His code word for that is being real. Being real things Reality. So abstractions are necessarily social because they're universals, which mean not only can an individual apply them to many things, but individuals can share them, maybe have to.

28:22 Mark: It's like a private language argument thing.

28:24 Seth: Yeah. And so I think, you know, the account of something like mathematics would be the number three as an abstraction does not have sensuous reality, but it is certain because there's this shared usage of it and so on and so forth. There is no number three, but there are three books in front of me or whatever, you know. So I'm just speculating on how he might answer that. But I get the criticism you're talking about. I mean, this, to me, that, that social component of it, I think we can read it very much in the Hegelian lineage, like he's retaining.

So there's a part later on where he says, you know, you never really can be an I until you're a you. And a you is an I is a subject for whom everybody else and everything else is an object, but a you is when you are an object for another subjectivity. And that's not unlike the self consciousness dialectic in, in Hegel. And he's, you know, essentially saying that.

29:35 Wes: Which Hegel stole from Fichte, by the way. But yeah, so there, yeah, he's. It's a. It's a third repetition of that.

29:41 Seth: But his point is that ultimately he's trying to make the point against an idealism that creates an abstracted ego or reason that is disembodied, you know, or in another way, say ahistorical. And he's like, no, there never was and never is a consciousness or a subjectivity that is not practically, particularly immaterially constructed through a body. And to just ignore that and pretend like we come to it later is just wrong.

30:18 Mark: Or to think that the best way to talk about it is to talk about how a non human, a thinking unconnected with any specific human mind.

30:27 Seth: I don't know.

30:27 Mark: I mean, that seems a useful abstraction to me.

30:29 Wes: Right.

30:29 Mark: When we're doing a geometric proof, like we want to abstract from the fact that you're doing it versus I'm doing it, we want to just get the right proof, right?

30:38 Dylan: Yes, but this is where I think Feuerbach's response to my question would be, you would never have any mathematics if you had only one human being in the world. And his probably was right. You wouldn't ever have only one human being in the world because you wouldn't have a human being without having other human beings, not in The Aristotelian sense that you have to have generation and stuff like that, but the recognition is fundamental to it. You don't have human beings without that,

31:07 Mark: but you could have human beings, but not human being. In other words, human beings in their essence, we are species being.

31:14 Dylan: Yeah.

31:14 Mark: Yes, you would be merely animal.

31:16 Dylan: Yeah. And so the point would be made something like, you know, mathematics requires. The generation of mathematics requires other people and also this, the talking about the world and in a third person way, as an other thing. The response then comes, will be well, there's all kinds of mathematics that happens from thinking about mathematics. This is why before Plato and there's, you know, the Pythagoreans all the way up till now, there's the notion of mathematicians saying well the world of mathematics exists on its own terms. And Feuerbach would just deny that. He said you can't have a mathematics and thinking about it without having the world.

31:57 Wes: Well, we're speculating about what.

31:58 Dylan: I'm speculating, I'm speculating and I didn't mean to.

32:01 Wes: Yeah, he's going to turn, he's going to return us to materialism. Right. He's making a very serious argument to return us to something which early modern philosophy and the German idealists seem to have consigned to the dustbin of history. Right, but. Or at least early modern rationalists. But yeah, he's going to make a strong case that actually if we want a principle of mind independence, we can't have God provide it for us. We need something like matter. And then the question is why? And then why do we really need that? Why do we need matter in particular to be the principle of mind independence or at least sensuousness?

Right. And then the other question is, well then the question you're raising, Dylan, is like, well then how do you deal with all the philosophical problems that arise with materialism? The things that even like Platonism was designed to try to deal with like, like mathematics.

32:54 Mark: So like Section 43 again, we're right near the end of this just of the summary portion here, right. The sensuous is not, it's not the merely immediate, it's not the thoughtlessly self evident. So when you say stop being so abstract, that doesn't mean just like, pay attention, give the dumbest, most obvious interpretation of what's in front of you. Because you wouldn't, even though mathematics is right there in anything you perceive, you would not perceive that. You have to learn to see mathematically. We want to turn towards real sensuous things, making visible Making objective what is invisible to common eyes.

So this sounds to me like the phenomenologist to the things themselves. Like it really will enable you to talk about mathematics directly and not have to actually talk about, well, what's the structure of the human mind such that it would give rise like by turning to the sensuous. Things he just has a very elaborate account of like what the sensuous consists in. So I think pretty much anything that we could experience you would end up calling the sensuous. As long as you just keep in mind, you know, that you're doing it from the human point of view.

Is that.

34:03 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think you're getting at the sense in which he's a proto phenomenologist. Right. And so what we think of as objects of perception might also be social objects. It'll even say when I am touching another person's hand, I'm not just touching a physical object, I'm touching their. Their feeling. If. And the ego, or actually ego he associates with the abstract. But what another person is, is the whole. He uses this phrase, whole person. It's not just them as rational thinking, ego, it's the body, it's everything. And then the social, as you all have have already mentioned, is implicated in that as well.

So when I am right, what makes me an eye, what makes me a self conscious human being intimately involves this consciousness of another consciousness. Thinking of me as a person and not just doing that at some abstract level, which is what the master-slave dialectic kind of sounds like in Hegel, but really seeing me, right? Really physically seeing me. We're talking about gazes now. We're talking about someone physically perceiving me and me knowing that as a basis for my own self consciousness.

35:24 Seth: Yeah, I think there's a couple things about that, Wes. The first is you're right, I mean it's not. Our experience as human beings when we encounter and interact with other human beings is fundamentally not instrumental. Like I don't think of my wife as wife. She's. This is the person who is the class of. Has the predicate of wife, the dispenser of affection.

35:51 Wes: That's her essence. Seth, don't you see her as her essence?

35:54 Seth: No, I don't. Although she may see me that way. So you know, I'm interacting with her as a whole human being. Her body language, her physicality, her history, my history with her. Her words, her intonation, the temperature in the room. And that's how we move through the world. And that's how we also move through ourselves. There's never a time when you're sitting at a desk and you're simply a transcendental ego contemplating an idea your ass is comfortable, or not the hum from your computer or the flies buzzing around your book, or the temperature in the room or the hunger in your stomach, or the mushroom, the mushroom tea that you drank is somehow impacting your lived experience of yourself.

You know, he's like, when you touch your arm, you clench your fist, right? Like that is a very sensuous. And he talks about pain. I didn't spend a lot of time parsing through it, but, you know, we've talked many times before about how pain is. This, like, almost a counter argument to a lot of philosophical flights of fancy about the way we think and live in our bodies. But there's an immediacy to our sensuous experience that can't be escaped. And in a certain sense, I think he's just trying to bring it back to that in the same way that you could say, yeah, if there was one person, there would be no mathematics, but if there was no matter, there would be no mathematics.

Because mathematics is just a description of the regularity of the ways that matter interacts with itself. I mean, sorry, chemistry and physics and all that stuff, you know what I mean? Mathematics is something different. But the point being, these are abstractions that universalizations are ultimately intended to be descriptors of regularities in something. And in our case, that's mostly the world, reality, matter.

38:01 Wes: So, yeah, I don't. You know, again, we're speculating on how he would respond to these challenges to materialism, but I'm not sure that that's what he would say myself. I mean, I think it's a good guess, but he doesn't.

38:13 Dylan: Yeah, and I meant, I think it's worth us keeping in mind to think about what his response would be as we go along, but expecting that it's going to be a bit speculative. What you said just now reminded me of, and this is maybe just a recognition of his sort of phenomenology aspect, but the way he's describing us having an environment and the way you just articulated it just made me think how much, again, his way of thinking about these problems would accommodate modern neurobiology and neurochemistry kinds of thinking pretty straightforwardly, not only would it be how your stomach is feeling and whether you're hungry, but it would also be how is your body and neurotransmitter set reacting to different stimuli based upon other conditions in your body?

And how is that affecting the way in which you are inclined to respond or how much you have to control with your top brain or your lower brain of different kinds of aspects of your life and your relative ability to do so?

39:24 Mark: I think there's a very strong strain, you know, this, this, I mean, humanism certainly explicitly. And this man is the measure of all things. Like he says that at some. And pragmatism. So even though, you know, when you were saying, Dylan, oh, you know, math only applies to concrete thing. Well, I mean you.

39:43 Dylan: No, no.

39:44 Mark: Couldn't math just be there waiting for matter to, you know, it's the forms that matter would take, you know, if matter existed. But that sort of approach to abstraction is just so anti human. It is so abstracted from the pragmatic point of view. You know, he says in his theology a lot of times, like if God has all these properties, the sort of natural progression of theology might be to say, oh, God can't actually have a personality. You know, God has to be. If he's really all powerful, we have to just sort of say he's unknowable. He has all these properties that we can't actually grasp.

And according to Feuerbach, those properties are nothing to us. If we really think God is like, we have to use negative theology going back to our Maimonides episode, that God, we can only say what God is not, then God literally is nothing to us. That, that is just the way that our relation to our objects works is we have to. Only what they are to us is what they are. So this sounds very idealist, even though he's saying he's a materialist. Do you have an initial thought on this aspect of him that sounds super idealist, even though he's very much not.

41:02 Wes: It sounds idealist because. Say why again?

41:04 Mark: Because like God only is what God is to me, what God is to the believers. That, I mean, that's the chief example he gives. But I think that's true for everything our objects. Only by saying they are sensuous is to say they are only what they are to us sensual beings. So that it is very human centric, humanistic thinking. And in that sense it's only not idealism because he doesn't want to say they're ideas, he wants to say they're matter. But it is still like the world revolves around us as experiencing beings. Maybe that's just the phenomenological point of view.

41:41 Wes: Well, I think in the case of God. Yeah, I think in the case of God, I mean, he really is an atheist. He's arguing for atheism, and he's giving a psychological and anthropological, as he puts it, deflationary account of why it is we believe in God. And we're taking these properties of the human essence and projecting them into an imaginary being. Basically. That's his explanation. So God as such doesn't exist. Man exists. And yes, if you can say, well, religion properly understood is fine. If you're going to your Unitarian Universalist church, which is the church for atheists, and you're worshiping man at his best, human beings at their best, let's put it that way, then all well and good.

But if you believe in a personal deity, or even an abstract, rational Hegelian deity or a Neoplatonist, the one transcendent deity, none of that. I don't think he likes it. I think the one thing that transcends, right, God is supposed to be the transcendent. But the transcendent here is just the sensuous. It's just the material. It is the mind independent, the principle to which we are beholden. So we are gonna rub up against reality, and we can just have whatever thoughts that we want about it. And our thoughts about it are not just products of our cognitive faculties.

They are but the products of what is really out there. But one of the critiques, by the way, I think is it's kind of a critique I've mentioned before about Kant. It's the problem of contingency. And so I'll just repeat it because I think it's important and explains a lot of what he's up to. Kant can say, well, the formal element of reality is, such as our mind makes it, whether it's categories of the understanding, causality, right, or it's space and time, the forms of intuition. And someone like Feuerbach will say, okay, well, that's all well and good, but that's just the form that doesn't tell us anything about the facts.

You can say that the cat, if the cat is black, has to look that way because our cognitive faculties, blah, blah, blah, and it's a secondary quality or however you want to put it, and space and time the same thing, but the cat is on the mat. That contingent fact can't come from inside us, right? We don't produce our own facts and may have to look that way because of the way our minds are constructed, but the facts themselves come entirely from outside of us. Unless you pull a Fichte and say, well, the ego is actually just something writ large as God and God created Everything.

So God does produce the facts. So the mind in some sense does produce its own facts. And that. I think Feuerbach thinks Hegel was on the same track. But it's going to turn out that if you want a principle of mind independence, and it can't come from inside one's own mind, it can't come from in house, so to speak, and it can't come from some big world mind or God's mind either. You got to get out of the mind. You got to get out of the mind business if you want reality.

44:59 Dylan: Yeah. And the thing that he points to as. Is sort of the root of his metaphysics on this starts with here and there. That the fundamental. The thing that he. That's most convincing about there being an external world is that there's a here and there. And I guess he would. Guess he would challenge in this case Kant or Hegel, that that distinction makes any sense at all within our own minds.

45:27 Mark: Right. Yeah. So maybe a way that he's not a phenomenologist is that some of these phenomenologists, they seem to think that the. The subject object distinction is some kind of fundamental error and this is what gave rise to all this sort of skepticism. But for him, subject and object like that is the thing you do not want to deny. That's what Hegel was saying. Oh, the object is really subject. It's all. No, we really have to. And I think that's the same what you're saying, Wes, that, you know, the. The object presents itself as transcendent. You know, we.

Naturally, we can talk about this more. He is known as an atheist. Marx saw him as an atheist. I'm trying to remember if he actually says he's an atheist. I think so. But he also would be equally happy with, well, I believe in God. I just have a different meaning for the word God than you do. So at the. God as the correlate of, you know, this, what you were saying, Wes, is the highest appreciation of man at his best or something. You know, God as love. Right. God, he wants to make love, not be a predicate of God, like God is some thing out there that has loved.

But God actually is the essence of love as, you know, our essence. Whatever you believe God is, is the thing that you are lauding most in yourself and other people, you know, the species being. So we should absolutely believe in God as this love, which I think is fundamentally, you know, in our Spinoza ethics episode. Sorry, sorry, not his book. The Ethics, the Tractatus.

47:00 Dylan: Political theological.

47:02 Mark: Yes, yes. That despite all the weird stuff in the Bible like that, it comes down to this sort of very practical love thy neighbor. And that's the essence of the whole thing. And I think that's ultimately what Feuerbach agrees with. So I'm cool with being religious as long as that's what it means.

47:18 Seth: I think you're not wrong about that. And it comes across when you see him talking about Spinoza, he obviously likes him a lot.

47:24 Wes: Yeah, he actually. He explicitly compares himself to Spinoza. It's not. It's in the secondary reading, I think the Stanford Encyclopedia article, but elsewhere he. He explicitly compares himself to Spinoza in this respect.

47:36 Mark: All right, well, this was all summarizing, but, you know, we're gonna have the second half of this discussion and a whole second discussion to work through this, this long and detailed text. But I think we've given a good outline if you want to hear us start to go into. To more of the details in part 2. Become a partially examined life support support. You do that in a variety of ways and then that should be the next thing in your feed. If you're doing it just through Apple Podcasts, you're still gonna have to wait a week like everybody else. Yeah. See you next week. Thanks for listening.

48:08 Seth: Thanks.

48:09 Mark: Thanks.

48:09 Wes: Thank.