Abstract
Ludwig Feuerbach’s great moment of fame came in the 1840s, when, as Frederick Engels wrote, “we were all Feuerbachians for a moment.”1 The problem of what came after religion did not fade away as his fame did after 1848. Being a follower of Feuerbach meant profoundly different things to different people. Hess, Dittmar, and Wagner confronted the problem of what to do after Feuerbach’s critique of religion in different ways. And the world after 1848 was profoundly different. In the world of Vogt and Liebig, Darwin and Moleschott, in a world of natural science and positivism, complex readings of Luther and Hegel seemed beside the point; so did the arduous process of working oneself out from under the heavy legacy of German idealism. By the end of the century, Marx and Nietzsche became the new focal points of intellectual discussion. The problems they posed look in retrospect, however, much like the ones posed by the Feuerbachians.
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Notes
Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy,” in MECW 26:364; on Engels’s break with Feuerbach, see esp. Francesco Tomasoni, Ludwig Feuerbach und die nicht-menschliche Natur. Das Wesen der Religion: Die Entstehungsgeschichte des Werkes, rekonstruiert auf der Grundlage unveröffentlicher Manuskripte, trans. Alf Schneditz (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1990), 31–37
Jens Grandt, Ludwig Feuerbach und die Welt des Glaubens (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2006), 86–104.
See esp. Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 76
Feuerbach to Friedrich Kapp, Dec. 2, 1866, in GW 21:275, and Feb. 15, 1867, in GW 21:287-89; Kapp’s letters to Feuerbach of Aug. 10, 1866, Dec. 29, 1866, and Jan. 4, 1868 (in ibid., 21:258, 281–82, 337–39) show the sharp turn toward Prussia, military power, and the yearning for Germany to become a world power on the part of the incipient National Liberal; see also his proud reference to his son Wolfgang, who has begun to come to blows with his school friends in New York who did not support Lincoln (Kapp to Feuerbach, Dec. 10, 1864, in ibid., 142). See also Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s introduction to Friedrich Kapp, Vom radikalen Frühsozialisten des Vormärz zum liberalen Parteipolitiker des Bismarckreichs. Briefe 1843–1884 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1969), 24–30.
Mathilde Reichardt, Wissenschaft und Sittenlehre. Briefe an Jakob Moleschott (Gotha: Hugo Schenke, 1856), 85
Bernard Williams, ed., The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 171
Stefan Arvidsson, “Aryan Mythology as Science and Ideology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67 (1999): 340.
Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper, 1900), 194
Wolfgang R. Krabbe, “Biologismus und Lebensreform,” in Die Lebensreform. Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, ed. Kai Buchholz, et al. (Darmstadt: Häusser, 2001), 1:179–81
Of the many sources, see esp. Hans Schwarz, “Darwinism between Kant and Haeckel,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48 (1980): 581–602.
Friedrich Jodl, Ludwig Feuerbach (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1904), 115.
Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
Jochen-Christoph Kaiser, “Freireligiöse und Feuerbestatter,” in Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880–1933, ed. Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1998), 537–49
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© 2009 Peter C. Caldwell
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Caldwell, P.C. (2009). Conclusion. In: Love, Death, and Revolution in Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622708_7
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