Ludwig Feuerbach:传记、成就与不朽的遗产

Feuerbach's philosophy developed as a critique of Hegel's speculative idealism, which he viewed as the last, most abstract form of theology. He argued that idealism inverted the true relationship between thought and being, and that philosophy's proper subject was not the abstract Absolute, but the concrete, sensuous human being. In The Essence of Christianity, he contended that religion is a form of self-alienation in which humanity projects its own "species-essence"—its unlimited capacity for reason, love, and will—onto a divine being, which it then worships. In his later works, including the Lectures on the Essence of Religion, he developed a "bipolar" theory of religion in which religious belief arises from the human confrontation with nature, driven by the "drive to happiness" and the fear of death.

Feuerbach's thought was a major influence on his contemporaries, particularly Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx adopted Feuerbach's materialist inversion of Hegel and his theory of alienation, but later criticized him in his Theses on Feuerbach for having a materialism that was too contemplative and for understanding humanity in terms of a static "essence" rather than in terms of concrete social and historical practice (praxis). Feuerbach's work also exerted an influence on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.