Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Levine is the author of many books and articles—most recently Political Keywords, The American Ideology, and A Future for Marxism? He was, for many years, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and, more recently, research professor in philosophy at the University of Maryland–College Park. He is currently a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC.

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IN BAD FAITH

Prometheus Books

Contents

Preface........................................................7Introduction...................................................13Chapter One. Atheism: Young Hegelian Style.....................41Chapter Two. A Social Thing....................................65Chapter Three. The Tenacity of an Illusion.....................91Chapter Four. Beyond God and Evil..............................123Chapter Five. The Liberal Turn.................................161Chapter Six. A Precarious Left.................................185Conclusion.....................................................209Notes..........................................................213

Chapter One

Following the death in 1833 of Germany's and the world's leading philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a handful of students and young professors in Berlin set out to advance the cause of revolution in Germany, extending Hegel's ideas by launching a "critique" of contemporaneous ("Right Hegelian") Protestant theology. These Young (or "Left") Hegelians included David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Karl Neuwerck, Ludwig Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx; as remarkable a group of fledgling thinkers as ever joined together in a common project. Their rationale, the methods they deployed, and the substantive views they advanced seem exotic today, a relic of a long-ago moment in German thought. Nevertheless, from roughly the 1950s through the 1980s, Marxists in Western countries took a keen interest in Young Hegelianism because they saw Marx's early, Young Hegelian writings as key to developing a "humanistic" version of Marxism. More recently, with interest in Marxism on the wane, interest in Young Hegelianism has subsided. This is unfortunate because what we can still learn from Feuerbach and the others is more timely than ever.

I will not dwell on the movement's history or internal divisions, but to understand its contemporary relevance, it is necessary to say something about Young Hegelianism in its own time and place. Following Marx's lead, I will assume that Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity was, at once, the movement's seminal work and crowning achievement. Because Feuerbach influenced Marx, and because Young Hegelianism is inevitably viewed through a Marxist prism, this is a standard position. But even if Feuerbach's place in the Young Hegelian movement was less central than it seems to those who are mainly interested in Marx, the fact remains that his masterwork is immensely instructive for anyone interested in Abrahamic religiosity. To contemporary readers, The Essence of Christianity can seem a strange collation. This is hardly surprising: it is an intervention into philosophical and political debates that faded into obscurity long ago, and its underlying metaphysics is problematic at best. However, this is a rare instance in which God is not in the details. Feurerbach's larger themes matter more than his particular contentions or his efforts to defend them.

* * *

In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach had two interconnected aims: to develop a "philosophical anthropology," or, what comes to the same thing, an account of the human essence; and to explain theism in anthropological terms—revealing the human (anthropological) meaning that belief in God simultaneously expresses and conceals. Feuerbach also sought to uncover the human meanings of concepts that cluster around the God idea for which the concept of God is foundational. Criticism is the methodology Feuerbach devised for these purposes. It is a hermeneutical or interpretive method; a translation program, so to speak, that aims at what would nowadays be called a "theoretical reduction"—where one theory is recast in terms of another, more fundamental theory. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach's aim was to translate Right Hegelian Protestant theology, which he regarded as the most developed account of religious experience, into Young (Left) Hegelian philosophical anthropology, a theory he considered fundamental for reasons I will discuss. However, unlike an ordinary translation, criticism does not just identify equivalences. It eliminates the theory that is reduced away—in this case, the theology. Feuerbach seems to have thought that reducing a theory away dispatches what the theory represents; that it eliminates the theory's "object" along with its representation. It is not clear how this could be true generally or even what it would mean in most instances; but, as we will see, for Protestant theology as Feuerbach conceived it, his position does make sense.

Feuerbach had no need to rebut Christianity's foundational claim that "God exists"; that task was only preliminary to what he had in mind and it had been accomplished decades earlier. Indeed, there is a sense in which the critical program he devised establishes Christianity's truth—not literally, of course, but by showing that, in being false in the way it is, it expresses truths about humankind. Christianity misrepresents the truths it expresses, and its misrepresentations keep humanity in thrall. Feuerbach thought that reducing the theology of his Right Hegelian contemporaries to a true philosophical anthropology would emancipate humankind from Christianity's sway. Thus he took up earlier efforts to throw off Christianity's yoke not by showing, yet again, that theism (or deism) is indefensible, but by uncovering the human meanings that the God idea and all that rests upon it simultaneously express and conceal.

* * *

By their own lights, Feuerbach and the others were embarked on an emancipatory project that brings philosophy's history, as they conceived it, to an end—melding it into revolutionary politics.

The Young Hegelians developed their account of their role in German philosophy and politics by drawing on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind [Geist], published in 1807, and from the material published posthumously in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History and in his Lectures on The History of Philosophy. A certain conception of philosophy emerges from their reflections on these texts—one that emphasizes, and arguably exaggerates, Hegel's importance, and therefore the importance of his followers, including themselves. But however questionable their account of philosophy's trajectory may be, their conception of what philosophers do, shorn of its Hegelian entanglements, is sound and widely shared. For Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians, philosophy is not so much about doctrines as about resolving puzzlements of a broadly conceptual nature. To this end, philosophers construct theories, accounts guided by rational standards, of general and abstract notions—such as goodness and beauty and the nature of the real. Of course, these theories can be construed as doctrines. But not all collections of doctrines count as philosophies. Bodies of doctrine exist nearly everywhere and at all times. However, philosophy's way of making sense of the world, its distinctive project, has a determinate history; a beginning, a middle, and an end—or rather two epochal beginnings, middles, and ends.

Its first phase began in ancient...