CHAPTER 41
ATHEISM
TODD GOOCH
41.1 INTRODUCTION
CHRISTIANITY, the historically most prevalent forms of which have shared a core belief in the existence of a transcendent personal creator who brought the world into being from nothing, providentially directs its course, and has revealed his will to humanity in the Bible, was for between one and a half and two millennia the bedrock of European civilization. Although the proper understanding of the Christian faith and its relation to reason were disputed by theologians and philosophers throughout this period, from the fall of Rome until the seventeenth century, with few exceptions its fundamental truth was not. The assumption of this truth, and the authority of the political and religious institutions associated with it, thoroughly informed intellectual inquiry, as well as the everyday lives of scholars and non-scholars alike, well into the modern age. This is obviously no longer the case, and the reasons why are complex and various. Not least among them, however, was the emergence in nineteenth-century German philosophy of a number of powerful critiques of religion, and of Christianity in particular, the direct and indirect influence of which has been immense.1 The purpose of this chapter is to survey a number of these critiques and to examine their historical and conceptual interrelations.
41.2 D. F. STRAUSS AND THE DISSOLUTION OF THE HEGELIAN SYNTHESIS OF FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE
Writing in the early 1840s, 1840 by which time he had resolved to break decisively with the speculative philosophical tradition, Ludwig Feuerbach characterized Hegel’s system as “the last magnificent attempt” to restore through philosophy the truth of Christianity, which had been “lost and wrecked” as a result of the critiques of belief in miracles and of traditional arguments for the existence of God produced in the eighteenth century by the likes of Hume and Kant.2 This characterization obscures two curious features of the historical fate of Hegel’s philosophy, namely, that it has, since it first began to attract public attention, been variously interpreted in theistic, pantheistic, and atheistic terms, and that instances of each of these kinds of interpretation have occurred with some frequency both among Hegel’s defenders and among his critics. Feuerbach’s observation nevertheless attests to these facts: that religion takes its place in Hegel’s system between art and philosophy as a form of absolute spirit; that Christianity is presented in Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion as the consummate religion, in which the concept of religion is most completely realized; and that, in these lectures, Hegel offers a philosophical defense of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which he takes his theological contemporaries to task for having abandoned.3
That the compatibility of Hegel’s philosophy with Christian faith has been so controvertible is largely due to the role played by Aufhebung or sublation in Hegel’s account of the relation between philosophical and religious truth. As has often been observed, Aufhebung consists in the cancelation or annulment of a truth that is partial or limited, which at the same time preserves and raises that truth to a higher level or more adequate form. Hegel’s affirmation of the truths expressed in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation involves the negation of the representational form in which these truths are available to ordinary religious believers, and their restatement in the form of the Concept (Begriff), which Hegel regarded as the form in which truth presents itself to philosophical consciousness. Those among Hegel’s interpreters who have argued for the compatibility of Hegelianism and Christian faith have generally tended to emphasize the positive moment in this relation, while those who have disputed this compatibility have tended to emphasize the negative one.4
Christians have traditionally affirmed that God became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was born of the Virgin Mary, performed miracles, was crucified, died, and was resurrected before ascending into heaven, “where he is seated at the right hand of the Father.” The representational form in which these doctrines have traditionally been affirmed involves belief in the historical occurrence of events described in the New Testament. Hegel emphasized that the truths of Christianity are truths of the spirit and, as such, eternal truths, which are of a different order than historical truths. He did not directly address the question of whether the philosophical truth embodied in the doctrine of the Incarnation can be taken to validate claims for the actual historical occurrence of the events with which this doctrine has traditionally been associated. This question was posed and answered negatively a few years after Hegel’s death by a young theologian named David Friedrich Strauss in one of the most important books of the nineteenth century, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, first published in two volumes in 1835–6.5
Strauss undertook in this book to demonstrate the historical unreliability of the gospels—a task he approached with a degree of thoroughness and scholarly detachment that many of his contemporaries found shocking, and that had the effect in several quarters of undermining their doctrinal authority. The importance of Strauss’ Life of Jesus for the history of nineteenth-century philosophy is due to its Hegelian inspiration, and to the poignancy with which Strauss posed a number of issues that split the Hegelian camp.6 The sang-froid displayed by Strauss in applying the tools of historical criticism to the canonical gospels was the result of his confidence that the eternal validity of the truths affirmed in the Christological doctrines in no way depends upon the historicity of the events traditionally associated with them. The narrative presentation of these events, Strauss argued, was determined far more by the Messianic traditions inherited by the early Christian community than by any concern for historical objectivity. Myths, as Strauss understood them, are imaginative representations of conceptual truths, and are the only form in which such truths are accessible to those not in possession of scientific and philosophical culture (Bildung). The accounts of Jesus’ life preserved in the New Testament he regarded specifically as mythological expressions of the truths that God is infinite spirit; that what is constitutive of spirit is its capacity to distinguish itself from itself while preserving its unity in this distinction; and that insofar as the term “spirit” (Geist) applies to God and to humans alike, “[t]he true and real existence of spirit […] is neither in God by himself, nor in man by himself, but in the God-man; neither in the infinite alone, nor in the finite alone, but in the interchange of impartation and withdrawal between the two, which on the part of God is revelation, on the part of man religion.”7
When Strauss speaks of the God-man, he is not referring to the historical individual, Jesus of Nazareth, but to the human species conceived in its entirety, though not in the biological sense that contemporary readers might assume, but rather as the community of all finite persons existing throughout time and space who achieve self-consciousness to the degree that they come to participate in the thinking activity in which the reality of spirit consists. Underlying this reference is a conception of the relation between the infinite and the finite according to which what is “present in the infinite and in the divine Idea, ideally and collected into one, exists in finite reality and in the real world, dispersed into multiplicity.”8 The key word here is “dispersed.” The Idea does not disperse itself so as to lavish all its riches on a single historical exemplar. Rather, the various moments of the Idea unfold themselves in the course of its self-externalization in nature and its return to itself in the history of subjective, objective, and absolute spirit, so that its complete manifestation or revelation (Offenbarung) is coextensive with nature and history taken together in their entirety. On this view, the historical events of Jesus’ life merely provided an occasion for recognition of the unity of the divine and human natures, and of the abiding presence of absolute spirit within the community of finite or subjective spirits, to be evoked among his followers. These historical events themselves enjoy “no advantage over other histories and no relation to the idea that is essentially closer than others.”9
Although Strauss himself remained relatively conser
vative politically, the critiques of religion developed by the Young Hegelians, among whom Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge, and Bruno Bauer are generally counted alongside Strauss, are closely related to the contested issue of political sovereignty in post-Napoleonic Europe. The publication of Strauss’s Life of Jesus precipitated both the polarization of the Hegelian camp and the eventual mobilization of political power especially against its left wing. One indication of this polarization was the establishment in 1838 of the Halle Annals for Science and Art as a progressive alternative to the Berlin Annals for Scientific Criticism, which Hegel himself had helped to establish as a vehicle for the promotion of his view of Wissenschaft as the systematic presentation of the Concept. Strauss’s book confirmed the suspicions of influential conservatives like E. W. Hengstenberg and Heinrich Leo that Hegel’s philosophy, despite its use of Christian terminology, is incompatible with the understanding of Christian doctrine affirmed by the state-sanctioned ecclesiastical bodies, the implication being that Hegelians ought to be prevented from teaching in German universities. Those Hegelians who had secure appointments, including the editors of the Berlin Annals, felt pressured to discredit Strauss’s Hegelian credentials.10
The marginalization of Hegelianism in the universities under Prussian jurisdiction was exacerbated after 1840 by the ascension to the throne of the Romantic conservative, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The resulting economic insecurity, censorship, and surveillance to which the Young Hegelians were thereafter subjected contributed to the radicalization of their critiques of religion and of a police state that sought to legitimize its authority by an appeal to the positivity of the Christian revelation. One manifestation of this appeal was support for the so-called “positive philosophy” espoused by disciples of the later Schelling. Another was the appointment in 1841 to Hegel’s chair in Berlin of the elderly Schelling himself, whose services were enlisted specifically to destroy the “dragonseed” of Hegelian pantheism. In the face of these events, a number of Young Hegelians abandoned their hopes for a constitutional monarchy imbued with a Protestant ethos amenable to freedom of thought and expression and committed to progress in the arts and sciences, in favor of an explicitly atheistic and humanistic republicanism, conceived at first along liberal, but later, in some cases, along communistic lines.11
41.3 LUDWIG FEUERBACH AND THE TRANSITION FROM PANTHEISM TO ATHEIST HUMANISM
Among the primary contributors to Ruge’s Halle Annals was Ludwig Feuerbach.12 Unlike Strauss, and despite being a defender of the Hegelian cause until 1839, Feuerbach never subscribed to Hegel’s view of Christianity as the consummate religion. He said as much in a letter he sent to Hegel along with his dissertation in 1828, in which he committed himself to the task of establishing “the sole sovereignty of reason” in a “kingdom of the Idea.” This, he suggested, would require that “the I, the self in general, which, especially since the beginning of the Christian era, has ruled the world and thought of itself as the only spirit that exists at all, [be] cast down from its royal throne.”13 In his first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), Feuerbach argued that God, conceived as existing independently of his creation, is not yet conceived as spirit, since, in that case, nature and history are excluded from the divine essence and thereby rendered profane. That Feuerbach chose as an epigram for this book verses from Goethe’s poem-fragment, “Prometheus,” is significant both because it typifies the Young Hegelians’ identification with this mythological figure, who is also invoked in the preface to Marx’s doctoral dissertation, and because it was in response to reading this poem that Lessing was reported by F. H. Jacobi in his famous letters On the Doctrine of Spinoza to have expressed his inability to “stomach” more orthodox conceptions of the divinity, and to have declared himself a Spinozist.14
By the time Feuerbach published his most famous book, The Essence of Christianity (1841), in which he sought to develop “a philosophy of positive religion or revelation,”15 he had begun to move away from his earlier idealistic pantheism. That he nevertheless sought in this book to criticize both Hegelian speculative theology and the positive philosophy from “the same standpoint” taken by Spinoza in his Theologico-Political Treatise has often been overlooked.16 At one point in this Treatise Spinoza observes that the biblical authors “imagined God as ruler, legislator, king, merciful, just, etc., despite the fact that all the latter are merely attributes of human nature and far removed from the divine nature.”17 In Christianity, Feuerbach makes a similar distinction between the metaphysical and personal predicates of divinity. God considered as the theoretical object of rational reflection, or “God as God,” is a timeless and impassible entity unaffected by human suffering and ultimately indistinguishable from reason itself. “The consciousness of human nullity that is bound up with consciousness of this being is in no way a religious consciousness; it is much more characteristic of skeptics, materialists, naturalists and pantheists.”18 It is God’s personal predicates that concern the religious believer, for whom God exists as an object not of theoretical contemplation but of feeling, imagination, and prayerful supplication.
Whereas the metaphysical predicates, which “serve only as external points of support to religion,”19 can be thought of as ones that apply to the first person of the Trinity (i.e. God in his abstract universality), the second person of the Trinity, by virtue of his having subjected himself for the salvation of humanity to a humble birth and an ignominious death, “is the sole, true, first person in religion.”20 The doctrine of the Incarnation, Feuerbach argues against Hegel, is for the Christian believer not a symbolic representation of the eternal procession and return of infinite spirit into, and back from, its finite manifestations; rather, it is “a tear of divine compassion [Mitleid]” and, as such, the act of a sacred heart that is able to sympathize with human suffering.21 That God was compelled by his love for humanity to renounce his divinity and become human Feuerbach takes as proof that “Man was already in God, was already God himself, before God became man,” that is, that belief in divine compassion involves the attribution or projection onto God of a moral sentiment that can only be experienced by a being capable of suffering, which “God as God” is not.22
The Essence of Christianity is divided into two parts. In the first part, Feuerbach considers religion “in its agreement with the human essence,”23 arguing that, when purportedly theological claims are understood in their proper sense, they are recognized as expressing anthropological, rather than theological truths. That is, the predicates that religious believers apply to God are predicates that properly apply to the human species-essence of which God is an imaginary representation. In the second part, Feuerbach considers religion “in its contradiction with the human essence,”24 arguing that, when theological claims are understood in the sense in which they are ordinarily taken (i.e. as referring to a non-human divine person), they are self-contradictory.25 In early 1842 Feuerbach still preferred that his views be presented to the public under the label “anthropotheism” rather than “atheism,” emphasizing that his overriding purpose in negating “the false or theological essence of religion” had been to affirm its “true or anthropological essence,” that is, the divinity of man.26
Feuerbach begins The Essence of Christianity by proposing that, since human beings have religion and animals do not, the key to understanding religion must be directly related to whatever it is that most essentially distinguishes human beings from animals. This, he maintains, is the distinctive kind of consciousness that is involved in the cognition of universals.27 A being endowed with such “species-consciousness” is able to take its own essential nature as an object of thought. The capacity for thought is conceived here as the capacity to engage in internal dialogue, and thus to be aware of oneself as containing both an I and a Thou (a generic other), so that, in the act of thinking, the human individual stands in a relation to his species in which non-human animals, and human beings qua biological organisms, are incapable of standing. When a human being is conscious of himse
lf as human, he is conscious of himself not only as a thinking being, but also as a willing and a feeling being. With reference to the nature of the human species-essence, Feuerbach writes, “The power of thinking is the light of knowledge [Erkenntnis], the power of the will is the energy of character, the power of the heart is love.”28 These are not powers that the individual has at his disposal. Rather they are powers that manifest themselves psychologically in the form of non-egoistic species-drives (Gattungstriebe) by which individuals periodically find themselves overwhelmed, especially those poets and thinkers in whose works the species-essence is most visibly instantiated.29 Such manifestations include the experiences of erotic and platonic love; the drive to knowledge; the experience of being moved by the emotion expressed in music; the voice of conscience, which compels us to moderate our desires to avoid infringing on the freedom of others; compassion; admiration; and the urge to overcome our own moral and intellectual limitations. The latter urge, Feuerbach contends, presupposes an awareness that our individual limitations are not limitations of the species-essence, which functions thus as the norm or ideal toward which the individual’s efforts at self-transcendence are directed.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 154