Part of what I consider to be necessary to philosophical study is making sure I can track the development of concepts and movements enough to see where others are taking their points of departure. The Young Hegelians, of which Feuerbach was a member, took their point of departure from Hegel, and Marx from the Young Hegelians. This makes them somewhat important in the history of ideas. The difficulty is always that figures like him are usually studied only for the purposes of understanding the figures they transitioned between. H. S. Harris, a translator of Schelling and Hegel's Critical Journal essays, mentions somewhere that it should be kept in mind he only reads Schelling for the light he throws upon Hegel, and this heavily shows in his translations. We are lucky here to have George Eliot as an early translator of Feuerbach, and she is definitely the one to go with on this.

Nonetheless there will be the presence of Hegel in this book. Given the climate of German philosophy as explained by the detractors of Hegel, I expected this to be more sycophantic and referential to him than it was. In truth you can take either one without the other if you want. The Young Hegelians focus more on the political and religious critiques one can amass with the Hegelian structure, and not so much on the absolute idealism itself, though they don't depart from the language all too greatly. I'd wager you don't have to understand Hegel more than superficially to understand this.

The other review of this said that this type of optimistic secularism isn't around anymore, and this is a shame. All the pressures to reunite religion and reason sort of dissipated in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, partially because of the consolidations of science and partially from movements away from the combination of church and state. Christianity is in a strange spot at the moment. I might say more when I get to reviewing Kierkegaard. Back then though one of the problems which Feuerbach wanted to overcome was to integrate Christianity into the Hegelian system, and it involves moving the conceptions of religion out of objectivity (where they tend to become dogma) and back into subjectivity. In one sense this is sublime, as the other reviewer says. In another this tends to be a roundabout neutering of Christianity, which does not want that to happen to itself. It does have some really great passages but tends to drag in parts.

It's interesting how both Kierkegaard and Feuerbach make similar (contemporaneous) developments in placing religion in the realm of subjectivity, but they go different ways to reinterpret its source of truth once it is divorced from any objective assurances. K. solves this by denying a proof of Christianity in the direct sense, F. by resigning the older dogmatic Christianity to a necessary stage of development and making his refined Christianity a part of the completed Hegelian system. (I think it still remains a subjective moment, and is not re-related back to the objective, since the other parts of the system reinhabit the necessary objective structure that Christianity vacates, though I might be wrong.)

It's worth reading for those interested in religion. It's not stuff that gets thrown around a lot. I find it difficult to accept Christianity fully, difficult to reject it fully, difficult to divide it into bits and pieces to accept and reject, and difficult to ignore the problem. Seeing something that attempts to overcome those difficulties by a good thinker is stimulating in that respect.

Essence of Christianity

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