Abstract
“No religion—that is my religion.”1 Feuerbach’s 1846 statement was deliberately paradoxical. On the one hand, he rejected religion insofar as it was the alienation of human qualities onto a nonhuman, transcendent entity. On the other hand, the rejection took a religious form: the substance of religion remained, now purified of religious form, as “my religion.” Feuerbach did not abandon religion by rejecting it, but rather claimed to reveal its true content. That content, as the previous chapter showed, was the true human essence. It was the human “species-being,” now become conscious of itself as limitless possibility (from the point of view of humanity) to sense, to know, and to act.
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Notes
See the letter from Kriege to Feuerbach of Apr. 18/19, 1845, referring to a now lost letter from Feuerbach, in GW 19:19-20. The relationship between Feuerbach and Kriege is apparent mostly through several adulatory letters sent by Kriege; Feuerbach decided in early 1845 to burn most of those letters, fearing that the police would search his home after Kriege’s expulsion from Leipzig and eventual emigration to the United States. See the summary in Josef Winiger, Ludwig Feuerbach: Denker der Menschlichkeit (Berlin: Aufbau, 2004), 234–37
Alfred Wesselmann, Burschenschaftler, Revolutionär, Demokrat: Hermann Kriege und die Freiheitsbewegung 1840–1850 (Osnabrück: Der Andere Verlag, 2002).
On faith in Hess see Shulamit Volkov, “Moses Hess: Problems of Religion and Faith,” Studies in Zionism 3 (1982): 1–15.
See for example the important introduction by Theodor Zlocisti to Moses Hess, Jüdische Schriften (Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1905)
Kenneth Koltun-Fromm’s Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)
On Hess’s early life, see esp. Edmund Silberner, Moses Hess: Geschichte seines Lebens (Leiden: Brill, 1966)
Hess to M. Levy, Apr. 1831, in Moses Hess, Briefwechsel, 47, where he refers to himself as a “truly pious Jew, but only insofar as a pious human.” See also Horst Lademacher, introduction to Moses Hess, Ausgewählte Schriften (Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1981), 8–9
Volkov, “Moses Hess,” 5. Warren Breckman notes the importance of immanence to Hess, but underplays the important distinctions between Hess as a follower of Spinoza, and those in the Hegelian tradition: Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origin of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 192–95. See also John Edward Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism 1805–1841 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 238–42
Moses Hess, The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings, ed. Shlomo Avineri (New York: Cambridge, 2004), 54–55.
The difference between Hess and Fourier at this point was still significant, however, as Hess still sought to find redemptive truth from within the Bible and sacred history, while Fourier derived his prophecy of the new world from a peculiar reading of the everyday world around him, which he thought betrayed the intentions of the benevolent deity. On the connection between socialist and religious utopian communities, see Michael Graetz, “Humanismus, Sozialismus und Zionismus,” in Myriam Yardeni, ed., Les juifs dans l’histoire de France (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1980), 161–64
Carl J. Guarneri, “Reconstructing the Antebellum Communitarian Movement: Oneida and Fourierism,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996): 463–88
Donald E. Pitzer, ed., Americas Communal Utopians (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
The crisis in Cologne became a cause célèbre in the late 1830s, especially after the Young Hegelians were blamed for undermining religion and morality. See Gisela Mettele, Bürgertum in Köln 1775–1870. Gemeinsinn und freie Assoziation (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 238–44
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), 418–20
Harold Mah, The End of Philosophy, the Origin of “Ideology”: Karl Marx and the Crisis of the Young Hegelians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 107–10.
Of the many accounts of Hess’s encounter with Feuerbach, see esp. Silberner, Moses Hess, 113, 128, 190–91, 196–97, 199–200; Georg Lukacs’s dogmatic critique of 1926, “Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics,” in Political Writings 1919–1929, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: New Left Books, 1972), 181–223
Emil Hammacher, “Zur Würdigung des ‘wahren’ Sozialismus,” Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung 1 (1911): 41–100
Junji Kanda, “Moses Hess und der gescheiterte Weg von Hegel zu Feuerbach,” both in Hans-Jürg Braun, et al., eds., Ludwig Feuerbach und die Philosophie der Zukunft (Berlin: Akademie, 1990), 593–642.
Feuerbach, “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy,” in Lawrence S. Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians: An Anthology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1983), 156–58.
Ibid., 293; Andreas Arndt, “‘Neue Unmittelbarkeit’: Zur Aktualisierung eines Konzepts in der Philosophie der Vormärz,” in Walter Jaeschke, ed., Philosophie und Literatur im Vormärz: Der Streit um die Romantik (1820–1854) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998), 220–21.
See esp. Dieter Dowe, Aktion und Organisation. Arbeiterbewegung, sozialistische und kommunistische Bewegung in der preussischen Rheinprovinz 1820–1852 (Hanover: Verlag für Literatur und Zeitgeschehen, 1970)
Paul Lawrence Rose, German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 313–17.
Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 50.
Ernst Bloch’s attempt to address the problem of entelechy in the context of a crude, power-oriented state socialism in the German Democratic Republic is relevant here. Few socialists have understood as well as Bloch the intellectual contexts and problems of German socialism at its origin. See Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97–140.
“Rother Katechismus für das deutsche Volk,” in PSS, 448. As late as 1847, Engels was still using the form of a catechism to present the position of the Communists: Herwig Förder and Martin Hundt, “Zur Vorgeschichte des Kommunistischen Manifests: Der Entwurf des ‘Kommunistischen Glaubensbekenntnis’ vom Juni 1847,” Die bürgerlich-demokratische Revolution von 1848/49 in Deutschland (Dadiz: Topos, 1978), 243–75.
Jürgen Herres, 1848/49: Revolution in Köln (Cologne: Janus, 1998), 15–20.
Herres, 1848/49, 48–53, Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 211–13
Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert. Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), esp. 193–235.
Mathilde Reichardt, Wissenschaft und Sittenlehre. Briefe an Jakob Moleschott (Gotha: Hugo Schenke, 1856).
Hess, “Naturwissenschaften und Gesellschaftslehre,” Das Jahrhundert II (1857), 287.
Hess, “Der deutsche Humanismus,” Das Jahrhundert 2 (1857), 1051.
See the account in Silberner, Moses Hess, 242–45; and Na’aman, Moses Hess, 184–85. For more on the context, and on the unresolved question of how much Hess’s critique of anti-Semitism already existed during the Damascus Affair in 1840, see Silberner, Moses Hess, 62–64; Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 323–25
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Faith According to Luther, trans. Melvin Cherno (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 79.
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© 2009 Peter C. Caldwell
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Caldwell, P.C. (2009). Moses Hess, Love, and “True Socialism”. In: Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622708_3
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