(Article,
‘Feuerbach’, first published in The Cambridge Wagner
Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
 |
| Engraving from 1872, Die Gartenlaube |
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (b. Landshut,
28 July 1804; d. Rechenberg [near Nuremberg], 13 Sep. 1872) Philosopher, attended
Berlin lectures by Hegel and
Friedrich Schleiermacher. Feuerbach lectured at Erlangen but failed to obtain a
university position, an ambition rendered impossible following revelation of
his authorship of the atheistic Thoughts
on Death and Immortality (published anonymously, 1830); he relied upon
income from his wife’s factory. A key member of the “Young Hegelian” school,
Feuerbach inspired many 1848 radicals, whilst remaining personally aloof from revolution. Following the factory’s
bankruptcy, Feuerbach’s later years were spent in relative poverty. Having read
Marx’s Capital, he joined the Social
Democratic Party in 1870.
Feuerbach’s interests
remained founded upon the theology of his youth. Unmasking the “secret” – a
typical Young Hegelian conceit – of religion as inversion, he proceeded to
anthropological criticism of philosophy, understood as abstraction from
theology, itself abstracted religion. Man had transferred all his greatest
qualities to an imagined, transcendental being, God. Humanity was impoverished;
love, the essence of religion, was
perverted, even denied. Love must therefore be brought back down to earth, as
Wagner attempted in the Ring, most clearly in Siegmund’s rejection of Valhalla, of
immortality as promised by Brünnhilde,
and subsequently, her Siegmund/love-inspired rebellion against Wotan. She loses divinity but gains
humanity.
Feuerbach had become, for
Wagner, “the proponent of the ruthlessly radical liberation of the individual
from the bondage of conceptions associated with the belief in traditional
authority” (My Life, English tr., 430). The title of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft echoed its
dedicatee’s Principles of the Philosophy
of the Future. Like many of his generation, Wagner not only followed
Feuerbach’s critique of religion,
but extended it to political and economic life. Alberich
transforms value-free Rhinegold into possessed – in more than one sense –
capital, a classic case of Feuerbachian inversion. What should be loved,
enjoyed, and possessed though not owned by all, enslaves the Nibelungs as if it
were divine. Likewise, Wotan enjoys not only religious but political power
through the fortress of Valhalla. Principles that were, at least for a time,
potentially good, have come to rule over mere mortals. Those principles, sapped
of life just like the World-Ash tree, have hardened into law. Wotan and
Alberich battle for possession of a ring whose imagined power rules the world. As
Wagner explained to August Röckel,
“the essence of change is the essence of reality, whereas only the imaginary is
changelessly unending,” (Letter of 25/26 January 1854). Liberation “from the
bondage of [such] conceptions” was the task of the Dresden uprising and its dramatic counterparts: Volsung
revolution and Brünnhilde’s elevation to the “purely human.” Such sentiments
remained part of Wagner’s conception until completion of the Ring and indeed of Parsifal too, neither
supplanted by nor vanquishing newer, metaphysical concerns.
To take one example, that sympathy
for fellow human beings (Schopenhauer’s
Mitleid), which Brünnhilde exhibits
in her benedictory Immolation Scene, is prefigured in Feuerbach’s “species
being.” Consciousness of fellow suffering or indeed joy is what distinguishes
man from beast, and what must once again be ascribed to man rather than God.
Brünnhilde’s example is intended for the “watchers” – as well as us – who might
therefore heed Wagner’s Feuerbachian words of 1849: “We see that man is utterly
incapable in himself to attain his destiny, that in himself he has not the
strength to germinate the living seed distinguishing him from the beast. Yet,
that strength, missing in man, we find, in overflowing abundance, in the
totality of men. … Whereas the spirit of the isolated man remains eternally
buried in deepest night, it is awakened in the combination of men,” (Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, 12:242). Wagner’s dialectic between Feuerbach and Schopenhauer
harks back to their common Romantic roots in Schleiermacher’s theology of love,
creating something dramatically new.
Mark Berry, Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire (Aldershot
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006)
Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future,
tr. Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1986).
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. George
Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1989).