Abstract
Among the Young Hegelians it was Bruno Bauer, theologian turned passionate atheist, who struggled most desperately to interpret Hegel’s absolute idealism as the vindication of the sovereign rights of the human self-consciousness. Bauer’s radically intellectualist search for genuine humanity in the spontaneous activity of the free mind, liberated from history and the absolute, failed to discover a sustaining field of activity in the social group or any other collective, and ended as an abandonment of European intellectual history, but he succeeded in demonstrating the critical potential of his own conception of the self-consciousness.
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D. Hertz-Eichenrode, ‘Der Junghegelianer Bruno Bauer im Vormärz’, D. Phil, thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 1959, pp. 10–19.
Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (2nd edition, Leipzig, 1846), pp. vi–vii.
Ibid., p. viii.
Ibid., p. xx.
Ibid., p. xxiv.
Ibid., I, p. 408.
Ibid., I, p. 244.
A. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, London, 1954, p. 138
Z. Rosen, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, The Hague, 1977, p. 50.
Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte, III, p. 14.
Ibid., III, p. 15.
Ibid., III, 252.
Ibid., III, p. 308.
Ibid., III, p. 309.
Ibid., III, p. 310.
Ibid., III, p. 312.
Schweitzer, op. cit., p. 160.
Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen, 1841, in Löwith, K. Hegeische Linke, Stuttgart, 1962, p. 166.
Ibid., p. 151.
Ibid., p. 159.
Ibid., p. 220.
Ibid., p. 170, quoted from the Preface to Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie.
Ibid., p. 171.
Ibid., p. 171.
Bauer’s interpretation of Hegel was strikingly similar to that of the most celebrated exponent of a ‘left-wing’ interpretation of the Phänomenologie des Geistes: ‘by seeing in the Wise Man the human ideal in general, the Philosopher attributes to himself as Philosopher a human value without equal (p. 88)… In short the Phenomenology only shows that the ideal of the Wise Man, as it is defined therein, is the necessary ideal of philosophy, and of every philosophy — that is, of every man who puts the supreme value on Self-consciousness, which is precisely a consciousness of self and not of something else’, (p. 92) Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, New York, 1969.
Posaune, p. 170.
E. Barnikol, in his Bruno Bauer, Studien und Materialen (Assen, 1972), considered this review to be the work of Bauer himself, (p. 547)
Deutsche Jahrbücher, 1841, p. 594.
Ibid., p. 594.
Der christliche Staat und unsere Zeit, Hallische Jahrbücher, 1841, p. 537.
Ibid., p. 537.
Ibid., p. 541.
Ibid., p. 542.
Ibid., p. 550.
Die gute Sache der Freiheit und meine eigene Angelegenheit (Zürich und Wintertur, 1842), p. 39.
Ibid., p. 214.
Ibid., p. 217.
Rosen, op. cit., p. 120.
For E. Barnikol, in his essay ‘Bruno Bauers Kampf gegen Religion und Christentum und die Spaltung der vormärzlichen preussischen Opposition’ (in Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, Band XLVI, Neue Folge LX, 1927) Bauer’s Das entdeckte Christentum was to ‘decide the question of religion once and for all’ and to abolish the religious foundations of the establishment. ‘Bruno Bauer’s conflict with religion was in the service of his Prussian politics, which was intended to dominate the Prussian state, to free it and to found, through “pure criticism”, a state both internally and externally truly independent of religion and the Church. In this sense, which cannot be emphasized enough, his struggle against religion was to him a service to the state’, (p. 21) Barnikol notes further, however, that Bauer’s extreme atheism, combined with his unpolitical and illiberal judgements of the situation, caused a harmful split in the liberal opposition to the regime: Bauer rejected co-operation with the liberals since his own ideal was an atheistic rather than a politically liberal state. His articles destroyed the politically liberal potential of the Rheinische Zeitung. This reinforced by his refusal to condemn the Berlin Freien, led to Marx’s break with him. Cf. Rosen, op. cit., pp.214–5.
Die Judenfrage, in Deutsche Jahrbücher, 1842, p. 1108.
Ibid., p. 1119.
Kritik der Synoptiker, I, p. 25.
Über die Fähigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden, in H.M. Sass, ed., Feldzüge der reinen Kritik (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 186.
Ibid., p. 182.
Ibid., p. 190.
Kritik der Synoptiker, III, p. 99.
Das entdeckte Christentum, Zürich, 1843, re-issued by E. Barnikol in Das entdeckte Christentum im Vormärz, Jena, 1927, p. 141.
Die gute Sache der Freiheit, pp.9–10.
Ibid., pp. 27–8.
Das entdeckte Christentum, p. 141.
Theologische Schaamlosigkeiten, Deutsche Jahrbücher, 1841, p. 465.
Ibid., p. 470.
Leiden und Freuden des theologischen Bewusstseins, in Anekdota, ed. A. Rüge, Zürich und Wintertur, 1843, p. 96.
Ibid., p. 101.
Theologische Schaamlosigkeiten, p. 466.
Leiden und Freuden, p. 112.
Das entdeckte Christentum, Zürich, 1843, re-issued by E. Barnikol in Das entdeckte Christentum im Vormärz, Jena, 1927, p. 138.
Ibid., p. 138.
Kritik der Synoptiker, II, p. 160.
Die gute Sache der Freiheit, p. 71.
Das entdeckte Christentum, p. 155.
Ibid., p. 155.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid., p. 158.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., p. 160.
Ibid., p. 162.
Die gute Sache der Freiheit, p. 203.
Hertz-Eichenrode, ‘Der Junghegelianer Bruno Bauer im Vormärz’, op. cit., p. 89.
Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik? first published in Bauer’s Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, June 1844, re-printed in Feldzüge der reinen Kritik, ed. H.M. Sass, Frankfurt, 1968, p. 202 (Sass ed.)
Ibid., p. 203.
Ibid., p. 207.
Ibid., p. 208.
Ibid., p. 211.
Bekenntnisse einer schwachen Seele, Deutsche Jahrbücher, 1842, p. 596.
Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?, p. 212.
Review of Hinrichspolitische Vorlesungen, in Sass, op. cit., pp. 197–8.
Bekenntnisse einer schwachen Seele, pp. 593–4.
Die Gattung und die Masse, in Sass, op. cit., p. 215.
Ibid., p. 216.
Ibid., p. 220.
Ibid., p. 221.
Ibid., p. 222.
Ibid., p. 223.
Ludwig Feuerbach, in Beiträge zum Feldzüge der reinen Kritik, Berlin, 1846, p. 4.
For N. Lobkowicz, in his Theory and Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), p. 257, ‘Feuerbach… instead of trying to transcend man’s finite condition simply declares man’s finite condition infinite. The task of philosophy, then, consists in “putting the infinite into the finite”, that is, in rediscovering the original infinity of natural finite man… Hegel conceived the self-realization of man as a transcendence of the limited and natural biological level; Feuerbach, on the contrary, condemned all such transcendence as “alienation”. In this sense he is a precursor of all “philosophies of life” from Nietzsche to Klages’.
For M. Wartofsky, by contrast, in his Feuerbach (Cambridge, 1977), Feuerbach envisages man’s transformation through the dialectical process of image formation: ‘The overcoming of sheer identity with the image is the work of critique. This critique raised to the level of self-recognition in the image is self-criticism. Self-transformation requires both self-objectification and the critique of this objectification. Dialectic is nothing less than this process of self-transformative praxis, therefore’, (p. 13).
Ludwig Feuerbach, p. 12.
Das entdeckte Christentum, p. 95.
For J.E. Toews, in Hegelianism. The Path towards Dialectical Humanism 1805–1841 (Cambridge University Press, 1980), although Marx, Feuerbach and Bauer ‘all accused each other of regressing to the abstract and undialectical positions of traditional metaphysical idealism or materialism, they all laid claim to the dialectical inheritance’. Bauer, as well as Marx and Feuerbach, made his analysis of the human condition concrete by ‘shifting the locus of human emancipation from the political to the social dimension’, although he rejected socialist and communist theory. ‘The development of Bauer’s critical theory after 1843 was also grounded in a critical reduction of the illusion of human essence to the concrete relationships of human existence’. While rejecting the social projects of the Feuerbachians, ‘Bauer also insisted that such negative dialectics was a positive, communal activity.’ (p. 365) For the present author, however, Bauer’s shift from political concern was less to the ‘social dimension’ than to a revolution of consciousness, a fundamental re-orientation away from all objective substance, whether religious or social, a characteristic of Bauer’s thought which is well-expressed by H. Stuke: ‘Bauer’s critique of established reality was ultimately not against particular historical relationships, institutions, ethics and rights, or forms and concretions of the spirit which no longer corresponded to its “higher concept”, but rather against the (in the Hegelian sense) continuing substance of world-history itself’. (Philosophie der Tat, Stuttgart, 1963, p. 186.)
Russland und das Germanentum, Charlottenburg, 1853, p. 121.
Kritik der Synoptiker, III, p. 310.
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Gascoigne, R. (1985). Bauer: Atheistic Humanism and the Critique of Religious Alienation. In: Religion, Rationality and Community. Archives Internationales D’Histoire Des Idees / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 105. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5051-1_2
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