Ludwig Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804, in Landshut, Bavaria, the fourth son of Paul Johann Anselm, a distinguished jurist, criminologist, and champion of liberalism, and Wilhelmina Tr"ster Feuerbach. Feuerbach's father, a temperamental and demanding man, ruled the family with stern authority, closely monitoring his children's education at all times. Feuerbach attended primary school in Munich and, in 1817, entered the Ansbach Gymnasium, completing his secondary education in 1822. The next year he enrolled at Heidelberg University to study theology where, in a course on speculative theology, he first became introduced to the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose thought heavily influenced Feuerbach throughout his lifetime. He was so taken with Hegel's ideas that within a year he transferred to the University of Berlin to study directly under the philosopher.
At Berlin, Feuerbach studied under theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hegel, soon abandoning his religious studies in favor of philosophy because he could no longer reconcile faith and reason. In 1825, he finally persuaded his father to allow him to transfer to the Philosophy Department. However, when the government discontinued the civil servant stipends to Feuerbach and his brothers, he was forced to transfer to the less expensive University of Erlangen. Nonetheless, financial hardship ultimately forced him to withdraw and return to Ansbach, where he composed his dissertation Reason: Its Unity, Universality, and Infinity (1828). Upon its submission to the Philosophy Department at Erlangen, Feuerbach was awarded his doctorate and offered a position on the faculty as a lecturer on the history of modern philosophy.
In 1830, Feuerbach's brief academic career ended by the publication of Thoughts on Death and Immortality, in which he denied the Christian idea of personal immortality. The topic of religion dominated his philosophical writings throughout his lifetime, and this publication was his first open assault on what he considered to be a subjective, self-deifying system of egotism. According to Feuerbach, the belief in personal immortality implied the infinite, and thus divine, nature of human beings. Therefore, to believe in the afterlife is equivalent to atheism because if humans are divine, then God cannot be. To avow one's own immortality is necessarily to disavow God's.
Even though Thoughts on Death and Immortality, which was considered heresy and politically threatening to the establishment, was published anonymously, Feuerbach was soon identified as the author. The repercussions were severe; in 1832 Feuerbach lost his position at Erlangen, and despite his academic friends' best attempts to appeal on his behalf, he never secured another academic position. He retreated into private life and wrote a series of three books on the history of philosophy. He married Berta Löw in 1837, and the couple moved to Löw's family estate near Bruckberg, where they lived modestly from proceeds of a porcelain factory Löw had inherited along with the profits from Feuerbach's writings. During his time at Bruckberg, Feuerbach wrote three more major works: The Essence of Christianity (1841), The Essence of Religion (1845), and Lectures on the Essence of Christianity (1848). The Essence of Christianity , which was hugely successful, had a lasting and important impact on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and was heralded by humanists in both Europe and the United States.
In his philosophy, Feuerbach maintained a Hegelian perspective which became more and more focused on human beings' intrinsic relationship to nature and the dependence for meaning on the senses, rather than pure reason. In so doing he offered the negative of Hegel's ideas. Whereas Hegel argued that creation was the objectification of God as a means by which God comes to self-consciousness, Feuerbach suggested that the idea of God results in humanity's self-consciousness of its own essential nature. A human being ("I") comes to self-consciousness over against something other than itself ("not I"). Hegel considered the "not I" to be the divine ("Thou"). For Feuerbach, the "not I" was both other humans and nature, thus allowing humanity to become aware of its unity within the species (thereby making way for communication, relationships, and love) and its uniqueness in contrast to its natural environment.
After the porcelain factory went bankrupt in 1859, Feuerbach and his wife moved to a more modest dwelling in Rechenberg, near Munich. Feuerbach was supported by a pension collected from his admirers that sustained the couple for the next ten years. He continued to write but failed to produce any works of sustained importance. In 1870 he suffered a stroke that left him incapacitated. Once again his admirers and supporters came to his aid and offered financial support to allow him to obtain proper medical care. Nonetheless, he grew increasingly weaker and died in Nuremberg, on September 13, 1872.
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