En:http://www.academia.edu/578816/Feuerbach_Nietzsche_and_Marx_on_Religion_Theology_Materia lism_and_Free_Will
October 2010 Este texto amplía la reflexión del primer núcleo problémico y hace referencia a uno de los objetivos propuestos:
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Analiza las diferentes visiones de Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Zubiri, Tillich y Dussel sobre el ser religioso del hombre y toma una postura crítica frente a sus planteamientos. (Comunicar y obrar).
Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Marx on Religion, Theology, Materialism, and Free Will Ryan Rabac Philosophers across history have defined the concept of God in various ways, and criticized the adherents of organized religion just as much.
For each thinker, the
collective religious outlook of the members of society limits its development. Each of these thinkers proposes an explanation of the development of religion and a solution to the problems it has created. Each has a completely different definition of materialism and a unique threshold on what can be considered free will. Feuerbach essentially views religion as the embodiment of a progression towards the highest of human ideals. He explains in Essence of Christianity how each basic element of the Christian religion can be explained by a collective human teleological desire for improvement. Feuerbach writes, “religion is the dream of the human mind” (3). As a Hegelian, or follower of the German philosopher Hegel, he views history as a
collective movement toward greatness. This is called an idealist perception of reality. “Man is nothing without some ‘objective’,” writes Feuerbach (8). Feuerbach writes “religion is the alienation of man from himself; for man sets up God as an antithesis to himself” (18). In his view, the figure of God evolved naturally as a set of the highest imagined human attributes. Where religion gets it wrong is attributing it to a separate being then man himself, creating said antithesis. Feuerbach uses Buber’s concept of “I and thou” in his description of a “trinity.” The general concept states that humans relate to each other based on their self-image reflected in each other. Feuerbach writes that an object is only significant because of a subject’s perception of it. With this, he constructs a pragmatic reality, on which he builds his own Christian religion. For the trinity, Feuerbach writes that the Father is “I” and the Son is “thou”, with the Holy Spirit being the cohesion between the two. Feuerbach spends several separate chapters explaining the evolution of the figures of God and Christ, as well as resurrection and revelation. Feuerbach writes, “God as God is the sum of all human perfection; God as Christ is the sum of all human misery” (29). Christ as an incarnate of God represents true love in a human form. “Love attests itself by suffering,” writes Feuerbach. Because the ultimate sacrifice for sins in the crucifixion is the ultimate embodiment of love, the Christ figure was necessary to represent that love. Feuerbach’s description of religion would cease to be critical if he didn’t continue his analysis of Christ. His resurrection story evolved out of the human wish not to die. The “purely negative wish not to die becomes positive and changes into the desire for a better life after death” (37). In this way, the Christ figure, which started as an embodiment of love, becomes nothing but a false escape mechanism from inevitable mortality. The role
that ‘God’ should play is the embodiment of the highest of human ideals, but the role it currently plays is an antithetical and dogmatic one. Nietzsche’s view of Christ was that the figure evolved from the ancient Hebrew ‘slave morality’. “It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying "the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone— and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil…” (Genealogy 3334) Here he first constructs the foundation of Jewish morals as inverting the ‘nobility as good’ system of morality. After this inversion, a human figure was developed to represent their struggle: Christ, the holy representation of slave morality. He was “the enticing, intoxicating, overwhelming, and undermining power of that symbol of the ‘holy cross,’ that ghastly paradox of a ‘God on the cross,’ that mystery of an unimaginable ultimate cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man?” (Genealogy 34). The figure of Christ is the ultimate representation of the suffering Hebrew victims. Nietzsche concludes his point in Section Nine: “'the slaves' or 'the mob' or 'the herd' or whatever you like to call them—if this has happened through the Jews, very well! in that case no people ever had a more world-historic mission. 'The masters' have been disposed of; the morality of the common man has won” (Genealogy 35). Christ was the ultimate
embodiment of the suffering in the Jews’ slave morality, and became the enduring symbol as Christianity developed. Karl Marx defines both religion and the state as imaginary objects that people invest their needs in and categorize themselves by. Marx writes, “The state is the intermediary between man and man’s freedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man transfers the burden of all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the intermediary to whom man transfers all his non-divinity and all his human unconstraint” (Jewish). Just as in Feuerbach’s analysis, man sets up Christ as an object of human divinity. Marx sees Christ as a way of relating humans to divine ideals, just as the state interposes between human subjects and freedom. Feuerbach is sharply critical of theology, and uses the ancient Hebrews in contrast with the ancient Greeks as his analogy. “The Greeks cultivated the humanities, the fine arts, and philosophy,” writes Feuerbach (35). The Hebrews, however, “never outgrew theology, the study of how to keep oneself well fed…” (35).
He then quotes the
following from the Old Testament: At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God (Exodus 16:12). The Hebrews prayed and became dependent on their ‘creator’, which may have been important to early survival, but they never evolved out of a dogmatic dependence. Now, instead of having faith in fellow men, they rely on an outside being that doesn’t exist in that specific physical sense. He solidifies his argument by claiming that the only difference between the Hebrews and Christians in this case is nationality (36).
For Christians, theology becomes a dominant force that focuses faith away from the self and fellow man onto a powerful separate being. Because worship trumps good works in modern practice, “it is no longer the law but the fulfiller of the law who is the model, the rule, and the law of your life” (40). Man sets up an antithetical being with unreachable qualities that must be worshipped, instead of understanding that these qualities came from his own reason.
This slows societal progression and leads to
powerful guilt. Theology leads to the faith in, and dependence upon a personal God. This creates a focus on the individual, rather than the collective. Because the view of God as a separate being makes him individual, humans view perfection as something obtained alone. This vastly increases the guilt felt by personal sin. When men act collectively, Feuerbach writes, they “compensate for each other” the good outweighs the bad (44). He continues, “my sin is thrust into nothingness by the fact that it is only mine and not that of my fellow men” (45). In this scenario, guilt and good works tally into a collective conscious where the positive tends to outweigh the negative. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most famous critics of religion in history. In Section 343 of Book 5 of The Gay Science, he proclaimed the death of God, meaning that society had secularized and advanced to the point where it no longer needed God as a source of values. "The greatest recent event—that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes—the suspicion in whose eyes is strong
and subtle enough for this spectacle, some suns seem to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt…" (Gay) In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche discusses the way in which the powerful created a moral system that labeled them ‘good’. Nietzsche specifically criticizes the “English psychologists” for claiming that concepts of good and evil evolved out of the utility felt by certain actions. He argues that once these actions occurred, they became forgotten and became a normal part of society. How can they be considered good if society doesn’t remember them? Instead, good and bad were created as a divide to maintain power. The lower classes became the inferior, or evil. Nietzsche, like Locke and Hobbes, uses a ‘State of Nature’ approach to his naturalist argument for the evolution of morals. “In the days when mankind was not ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now that pessimists exist” (Genealogy 67). In the state of nature, men followed their instincts and competed for survival. As men evolved into societies, they became “ashamed of all their instincts” and developed a “mistrust of the riddle of life.” Of the ancient Greeks, he writes that their religion was based on a display of human power for the Gods. They developed gods that valued might and took part in vengeful acts themselves. They were modeled after humans.
The Trojan Wars, writes Nietzsche, were “festival plays for the gods”
(Genealogy 69). He continues, “Virtue without a witness was something unthinkable for this nation of actors.” ‘Good’ became the powerful military conquests of the Greeks, while evil became those who stood in the way. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues to justify punishment as a fair method of dispensing justice to the offender and equally as a sense of satisfaction for the
punisher.
“We may unhesitatingly assert,” writes Nietzsche, “that it was precisely
through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered” (82). He claims that punishers in ancient times were not aware of causing any guilt for their actions, simply dealing a fair reply to injustice. Of the punished, none felt any “inward pain” but only a “sudden appearance of something unforeseen.” This type of eye-for-an-eye punishment system, in Nietzsche’s view would have prevented the buildup of guilt that he thought had poisoned modern society. A lack of direct punishment has led to a collective psychological guilty conscience. Both Feuerbach and Nietzsche view religion as a system created by men. Feuerbach sees it as originally good intentioned, modeled after the highest possibilities of human achievement and subsequently poisoned by theological dogma. Nietzsche sees it as the “opium of the masses” (like Marx), a twisted moral structure that leads mankind away from his natural competitive instinct and causes tremendous guilt. ‘Freedom of will’ for Nietzsche would include the freedom to act out the natural instincts of man, and the right to decide morals for oneself, such as the case of his Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Furthermore, man should be able to justly punish those who act against him for the better health of both. For Feuerbach, this freedom would constitute the ability to strive for the highest possible attributes man can obtain. Religion is the constriction on free will for both of these thinkers, Nietzsche because of its moral power structure and Feuerbach because of its overpowering dogma that eliminates faith in self and fellow men. The thinkers agree on the creation of guilt by religion and its detrimental effects on society.
In On The Jewish Question, Karl Marx criticizes his colleague Bruno Bauer’s studies in Jewish political emancipation and constructs a political and moral outlook in the process. Bauer’s major claim is that the Jews are too theological to create an emancipated state, which must be secular to guarantee human rights. Marx combats this point by asserting that even in a purely secular state, religion will prevail, because it is allowed to do so.
He claims that a secular state will allow the development of
segregationist institutions, yet claim to hold its subjects in genuine equality. The state contradicts itself. Marx sees Jewish emancipation as impossible. “The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way characteristic of the Christian state – that is, by granting privileges, by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but making him feel the pressure of all the other separate spheres of society, and feel it all the more intensely because he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew, too, can behave towards the state only in a Jewish way – that is, by treating it as something alien to him…by putting his trust in a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind in general, and by seeing himself as a member of the Jewish people…” (Jewish) For Marx, religion is an infinite dividing line between people, because of its absolute beliefs. He doesn’t feel that Christianity and Judaism could coexist, because they inherently oppose one another. His opinion that a secular state only promotes division can be seen today in the United States, where the Christian religion dominates culture, although the number of Americans identifying themselves as nonreligious has increased in recent years (Kosmin).
One could easily argue, however, that the
nonreligious is only yet another divided group in this situation. Marx’s life works envision a society free from the constraints of dividing constructs like religion and economic classes. This is the only way for humanity to achieve its highest potential. Out of all three of the aforementioned thinkers, the only one to fully criticize both atheists and the religious is Feuerbach. The first Oxford English Dictionary definition for materialism is: Philos. Originally: the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications. Now also more narrowly: the theory or belief that mental phenomena are nothing more than, or are wholly caused by, the operation of material or physical agencies. Feuerbach’s conception of god is nonmaterial, yet still very real. Feuerbach’s God is “the highest conception [someone] can possibly have.” Of materialists, Feuerbach would criticize them for lacking the imagination to conceive of this real, but immaterial sense of God. The first chapter includes a claim that “the brutes have no religion” (7). Ideally, humanity would evolve beyond purely material interests. The same example applies to the aforementioned ancient Hebrews who were so deeply theological that they became dependent on a physical God. Materialism for Feuerbach could be said to include those who are dogmatically religious, because they believe in a physical separate supreme being. Nietzsche could be classified as a materialist under the supplied definition, although he did disagree with pure Darwinian naturalism due to his teleology.
In
Genealogy of Morals, he argues that values concerning good and evil evolved out of power structure and a slave morality system. Because he believes that religion is a part
of this, he can safely be classified as a materialist. He often, however, wrote of humanity working toward a higher state of being.
One of his most famous examples is the
Übermensch, or Superman, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche writes in Chapter 22 of Part One, “it is the great noontide, when man is in the middle of his course between animal and Superman, and celebrated his advance to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the advance to a new morning” (Bestowing). The Übermensch is the idealized final and ultimate human being who creates his own values, and the ultimate goal of humanity. If Nietzsche were purely naturalist, he would instead reject this goal and contend that human nature is merely a random struggle for survival without direction. Karl Marx is well known for his ‘materialist conception of history’. He viewed social ideologies as evolutionary aspects of a material basis. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes that “[his] inquiry led [him] to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life…” (Contribution). To Marx, class divisions and ideologies are side effects of a naturally evolving economic structure that comes from humans working together to provide themselves with the necessities of life. While Feuerbach would say that humans project their ideals onto the subjective world, Marx would say that objects influenced the origination of said ideals. Using the language of existentialists, Feuerbach would say “essence precedes existence” while Marx would say, “existence precedes essence.” Feuerbach’s general argument does contradict itself by asserting that religious components are constructs of the human mind, and then also asserting that objects have
inherent ‘essence’. Feuerbach writes, “each being is in itself and for itself something perfect and has its God, its ‘highest being’ in itself” (9). In Chapter Thirteen, however, he describes the development of the Jewish God. “In the earliest stages of religion there is no qualitative or essential distinction whatever between God and man…Thus in ancient Judaism, Jehovah was a being differing from the human individual in nothing but in duration of existence; in his qualities, in his inherent nature, he was entirely like man…” (Feuerbach 53-54) If there were no distinction between God and man, the object of Jehovah wouldn’t have to be created at all. Feuerbach is asserting the creation of a God just like man, i.e. “creating the essence.” If essence were to truly precede existence, there would be no need to create a God, only to discover it within. Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Marx all wrote for the purpose of analyzing the state of humanity and proposed changes for its improvement. For Feuerbach, society can only achieve further buildup of guilt and dependence on a nonexistent outside force under the current conditions. Ideally, humanity would drop dogma and redefine the concept of God as a collective construct, not a physical being. Modern Humanist movements are similar to this hope for collective progression. For Marx, society is trapped in a perpetual system of division, where classes of individuals will become further and further divided from each other. Until a perfect government and economic system is put into place, humanity can only achieve growth in resentment toward each other. Only after the religious “opiate” and socioeconomic divides are dissolved can each man live in harmony (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”). Nietzsche constantly sat on the edge of nihilism and worked hard to resist it throughout his career. In Section 341 of
Book IV of The Gay Science, he proposes that humanity constantly relives the same history in what scholars call an ‘eternal recurrence’. “Every thought and every sigh,” writes Nietzsche, “and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence” (Gay). In his view, we only lie to ourselves as we progress, thinking that we are doing anything different than previous generations already accomplished. Even if this eternal recurrence is inescapable, in Nietzsche’s view, humanity can live more fulfilling lives if they grow out of a moral and societal structure that empowers the few and limits true human instinct, and create their own true values.
Works Cited Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. New York: Continuum, Print. Kosmin, Barry A. and Keysar. "ARIS 2008 Report: Part IB - Belief." American Religious Identification Survey 2008 (2008) Web.26 April 2009. Marx, Karl. "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." Marxists Internet Archive. N.p., 1859. Web. 21 Oct 2010. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx /works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm>. Marx, Karl. "On The Jewish Question." Marxists Internet Archive. N.p., 1843. Web. 20 Oct 2010. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/>. Nietzsche, Friedrich. "22. The Bestowing Virtue." Nietzsche's Features. Holtof Donné, 1885. Web. 24 Oct 2010. <http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_thus_spake_ zarathustra/I_22.html>.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "The Gay Science." Nietzsche's Features. Holtof DonnĂŠ, 1887. Web. 24 Oct 2010. <http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_the_gay_science/ the_gay_science.htm>. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.