Dialectal Disenchantment: Metaphysics of Materialism in Feuerbach

Ecce Homo: Porcelain Socialism

The Capitalist Origins of Anti-Capitalism

Feuerbach came from a prominent family of scholars and was the fourth of seven children. His father, Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, was a renowned criminal law professor (known to Schopenhauer), and his brother, Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach, was a mathematician and physicist. In his early studies at Heidelberg, he was repelled by the Rationalistic Protestant Theology taught there by Heinrich Paulus (a friend of Hegel), which changed the course of his career from Law, like his father, to Philosophy. He spent two years in Berlin listening to Hegel, against his father’s wishes. His family was not completely uninvolved in the philosophic side of Prussian intellectual society—In a criticism of Fichte, Schopenhauer actually quotes from Feuerbach’s father: “Compare with it what the jurist Anselm von Feuerbach says about Fichte in his letters, published by his son in 1852”. He quotes Anselm Feuerbach’s legal works several times in Parerga and Paralipomena, showing how prominent of a legal intellectual he was.

Feuerbach’s break from Hegelian idealism marked a pivotal turn in 19th-century thought. While Hegel posited the Absolute as the culmination of dialectical history, Feuerbach inverted this framework, arguing that human consciousness arises not from abstract Spirit but from material conditions and sensory experience. His 1841 magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity, crystallized this shift, asserting that divine attributes are projections of humanity’s highest ideals—a theory Marx later secularized as ideological alienation and Freud whole-heartedly embraced. This anthropological lens, which treated religion as a mirror of human psychology, bridged Hegel’s metaphysics with the empirical materialism that defined subsequent German thought. Modern day secularism is deeply endebted to Feuerbach and his predecessor Bayle.

Despite his influence, Feuerbach’s later years were marked by intellectual isolation. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, which he had hoped would actualize his humanist ideals, he retreated to rural Bruckberg. There, he turned to natural science, studying botany and geology, yet his correspondence with revolutionaries like Engels revealed an undimmed belief in societal transformation. His 1857 Lectures on the Essence of Religion reaffirmed his view that theology must dissolve into anthropology, but by then, younger thinkers like Marx had eclipsed his prominence, critiquing his “contemplative materialism” for neglecting praxis. Marx writes in The German Ideology: "In Feuerbach, the individual must submit to the species, serve it. Feuerbach's species is Hegel's Absolute; it, too, exists nowhere."

Feuerbach studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he learned Hegelianism and later physically studied under Hegel at the University of Berlin. Eventually, he earned his Ph.D. and sent his thesis to Hegel. In 1830, Feuerbach published his first work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, which dealt with the concept of immortality and the role of religion in society. This work established him as a rising philosophical voice in Germany apart from Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Marx, with whom he was a contemporary. In 1839, he published Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy, which further developed his critique of Hegelianism and his own philosophical ideas, and ultimately his criticism of Christianity and religion in general is his enduring philosophic legacy, primarily through the adoption of his ideas by Marx.

Feuerbach’s critique of religion extended beyond Christianity. In The Essence of Religion (1845), he argued that all religious systems, from animism to monotheism, stem from humanity’s “feeling of dependence” on nature. This naturalistic interpretation challenged Enlightenment deism and laid groundwork for secular anthropology. However, his refusal to politicize these insights frustrated radicals; Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1845) famously reproached him for reducing revolution to a “theoretical” rather than practical act, a schism that defined Marxist dialectics.

In terms of Political-Military history, Feuerbach’s teachings were utilized by the "Vormärz" revolutions of 1830 and 1848, commonly known as the "March Revolution" or the "Revolution of 1848". Following the lead of the 1789 French Revolution, the February 1848 Revolution in France sparked a German version against the Prussian King Wilhelm I, laying the foundation for the German Empire. This period of political unrest saw Socialist and Nationalist violence, including anti-Jewish riots and a broad restructuring of Prussian society, ultimately setting the stage for the adoption of Communism, which was immediately superseded by National-Socialism.

In literature, Feuerbach’s imprint surfaces in Modernism’s secular introspection. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground grapples with Feuerbachian alienation, while Kafka’s protagonists confront bureaucratic voids where divine order is absent. Even Faulkner’s exploration of Southern decay reflects Feuerbach’s belief that “man’s God is man,” as characters cling to crumbling myths. Post-Modernists like Foucault later extended his critique, treating not just religion but all “truths” as human constructs—a radicalization of Feuerbach’s projection theory.

Feuerbach’s marriage to Bertha Löw in 1833 further shaped his philosophy. Her inheritance from a porcelain factory allowed him financial independence, yet their union faced scorn from academia, which deemed her bourgeois status incompatible with radical thought. This personal clash between material comfort and revolutionary ideals mirrored his theoretical contradictions, later satirized by Marx as “Feuerbach’s porcelain socialism.”

Theological critiques of Feuerbach were equally fervent. Kierkegaard, though sharing his disdain for Hegelian abstraction, accused him of replacing God with a “collective idol.” Similarly, theologian Karl Barth argued that Feuerbach’s reduction of divinity to anthropology exposed modernity’s narcissism, a warning echoed in later religious existentialism. Marx would agree with this critique: "Feuerbach has made the individual, the dehumanized man of Christianity, not the man, the true, real, personal man, but the emasculated man, the slave." These debates cemented Feuerbach as a linchpin between 19th-century theology and secularism.

Feuerbach’s final years saw a partial reconciliation with his early influences. Though estranged from Hegelianism, he praised Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) as validating materialism, writing that “biology has become the new metaphysics.” His 1866 essay “Spiritualism and Materialism” conceded that Hegel’s dialectic, stripped of idealism, could illuminate humanity’s “sensuous struggle” for progress—a nuance Marx rejected, deepening their divide.

Feuerbach was known for his charismatic personality and his love of good food and wine. He died on September 13, 1872, in Rechenberg, Germany, at the age of 68, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most important Materialistic philosophers of the 19th century- deeply influencing Marx's Materialism and the justification for wide-spread genocide under Communism. His unified Aristotelian Ontology built the anti-metaphysical foundation of the Social Equity movements of the bloody 20th century. Every major idea of Marx is explicit first in Feuerbach and Bayle.

“I am a follower of that Mighty Philosopher”: Hegelian Foundations of Marxism and Feuerbachianism

Feuerbach’s contact with G.W.F. Hegel was limited but telling. As a young man, Feuerbach studied under Hegel in Berlin (mid-1820s), immersing himself in virtually all of Hegel’s lectures – even repeating the logic course twice. In November 1828, the 24-year-old Feuerbach sent Hegel a copy of his Latin dissertation De Ratione, Una, Universali, Infinita, accompanied by an effusive personal letter. In this letter, Feuerbach professed his deep admiration for Hegel’s philosophy – calling it the “incarnation of the pure Logos” – and urged that Hegel’s ideas be carried beyond academia to inaugurate a new “kingdom” of reason in a world-historical epoch. Despite Feuerbach’s reverent tone, Hegel gave little if any response; by most accounts Hegel “refused to reply positively” to his former student’s overture. Consequently, their personal relationship remained a largely one-sided dynamic of youthful admiration on Feuerbach’s part met with polite distance from Hegel, with no extensive correspondence beyond that singular exchange. Feuerbach writes in the letter:

“The solitary reign of reason must and will come... Reason remains unredeemed in Christianity….Christianity... cannot be regarded as the perfect and absolute religion. That designation belongs only to the Kingdom of actuality—the Kingdom of the Idea, of existing reason…Nature remains uncomprehended, shrouded in mystery, subsumed into the divine essence—such that only the person, not nature, nor the world, nor spirit, partakes in salvation... It can be shown clearly and convincingly that it is an incoherent contradiction for anyone to speak of things as if they were detached from thought.”

Despite his direct criticism of Hegelianism, Feuerbach heavily borrowed from Hegel, incorporating both the fundamental dialectical model of thinking and a secularized version of Hegel’s eschatology. Feuerbach did not so much reject Hegel’s method as reorient its content and telos. He retained the dynamic structure of dialectical development—the movement through contradiction and sublation—but turned its trajectory away from the self-realization of the Absolute Spirit toward the self-actualization of embodied, finite human beings. In doing so, he effected a humanist inversion of Hegelian idealism: the divine becomes a projection of the human, and speculative theology is transformed into anthropology.

This reinterpretation also extended to Hegel’s eschatology. Where Hegel saw history as the unfolding of Spirit toward its full self-consciousness in philosophical thought and the modern state, Feuerbach secularized this narrative, proposing instead that the culmination of history lies in the realization of human essence as species-being—an essence rooted in sensuous, intersubjective life rather than metaphysical abstraction, writing that Hedonism was the ultimate achievement of human life. Thus, while Feuerbach critiques the abstraction and idealism of Hegel’s system, his own thought remains deeply indebted to Hegelian categories as well as it’s teleological assumptions, reworking them in the service of a philosophy that seeks to ground the universal not in the Absolute, but in the concrete, biological reality of the brevity of human life and the amoral nature of the material universe.

Marx was more open about being a product of secularized Hegelian thought, adopting and utilizing Feuerbach’s Materialism, but embracing Hegel’s oceanic, sweeping view of the eternal destiny of humankind. Marx’s entire concept of class structure is triadic—every concept is in constant tension with its antithesis, and new ideas arise from the resolution of this tension into a Synthesis. This method was fundamental to Marx's theory of historical materialism, which holds that society develops through a series of dialectical processes. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology, “The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to the other.” The triadic framework, inherited from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, became the scaffolding for Marx’s analysis of economic contradictions, yet its theological roots in Hegel’s secularized eschatology—where history progresses toward an immanent “end of days” in the form of absolute knowledge—remained obscured beneath Marx’s materialist reframing.

Marx copied nearly every aspect of Hegel’s dialectic model, including the concept of alienation, which holds that individuals are estranged from their true nature when they are alienated from their labor. Marx applied this concept to his own theory of historical materialism, arguing that alienation is caused by the capitalist system, which forces individuals to labor in order to gain access to the means of production. This is a nascent idea in Feuerbach, who saw belief in the supernatural as the alienating factor, and reconciliation to nature as reconciliation of the self to the self. Feuerbach’s assertion that “the secret of theology is anthropology” provided Marx with the pivot to transpose alienation from the spiritual to the socioeconomic realm, a move that retained Hegel’s dialectical structure while discarding its idealist content. Marx stated early in his career while referencing Hegel, “I am a follower of that Mighty thinker,” and Feuerbach states, “Spinoza is the real originator of modern speculative philosophy, Schelling its restorer, Hegel its perfecter.” These admissions reveal their shared intellectual genealogy, positioning Hegel as the unavoidable progenitor of their respective systems, even as they sought to dismantle his legacy.

Their criticisms of Hegel, as they fended off accusations that their philosophy was subtly Hegelian, are essentially the same. Feuerbach was technically critical of Hegelianism, which he believed was too abstract and divorced from the real world, yet his teleological view of human destiny is taken from Hegel’s secularized Platonic-Judeo Eschatology. He was particularly critical of Hegel's concept of the Absolute Spirit, which he believed was a "phantom of the brain,” as were all supernatural concepts to Feuerbach. Instead, Feuerbach argued that everything that exists is material and can be studied through empirical observation—in other words, he rejected the Phenomena-Noumena or Subject-Object paradigm of Platonism and favored one-world Aristotelianism. This epistemological shift, which Marx later radicalized, sought to ground philosophy in the immediacy of human experience, yet both thinkers inadvertently preserved Hegel’s teleology by substituting the “cunning of reason” with historical necessity, framing communism or humanist utopia as the inevitable synthesis of dialectical conflict.

There is little difference between Feuerbach’s 1839 Towards a Critique of Hegelianism and Marx’s 1844 Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Marx’s critique of religion is indistinguishable from Feuerbach’s. Friedrich Engels wrote his own book on Feuerbach titled Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie, in which he positioned Feuerbach as the “intermediary” between Hegel and Marx, though this characterization understates Feuerbach’s foundational role. To these thinkers, the idea of God is a human creation that is a projection of human values and desires. Freud and the Modernists would continue to mirror Feuerbach’s views on religion perfectly. All of these men believed that belief in the supernatural is an obstacle to human progress and that people should focus on human needs and desires rather than religious beliefs, as Feuerbach wrote, “Religion is the dream of the human mind.” Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927) echoes Feuerbach’s projection theory verbatim, positing religion as a collective neurosis born of existential helplessness, yet Freud’s dismissal of Marxism as “Hegelian residue” underscores the tension between materialist and psychoanalytic critiques of ideology.

In Towards the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx's argument is that Hegel's political philosophy is an abstraction that fails to take into account the concrete reality of human existence and the class struggles that shape it. He contends that in order to understand the state, civil society, and the concept of alienation, one must take into account the economic relations that underlie it and the material conditions of society. Marx’s critique hinges on the inversion of Hegel’s idealism: where Hegel saw the state as the embodiment of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), Marx reduced it to a superstructural reflection of bourgeois property relations, a formulation indebted to Feuerbach’s methodological inversion of subject and predicate in theological discourse. This methodological parallelism reveals the extent to which Marx’s “materialist turn” was less a rupture than a recalibration of Feuerbachian humanism.

Marx's primary criticism of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is that it is abstract and ahistorical, mimicking Feuerbach’s criticism exactly. Hegel's philosophy is based on the idea that the state is the ultimate expression of human freedom and morality, and it is his goal to demonstrate this through a philosophical system. Marx, however, believes that this is a false picture of reality and that Hegel's philosophy is divorced from the concrete historical circumstances that shape human morality and freedom. Marx wrote:

Hegel starts from the alienation (logically: the infinite, abstract general) of substance, the absolute and fixed abstraction. — That is, in popular terms, he starts from religion and theology. Secondly, it abolishes the infinite, sets the real, sensual, real, finite, particular (philosophy, abolition of religion and theology). Thirdly, it restores the positive, restores the abstraction, the infinite. Restoration of religion and theology.

This tripartite critique mirrors Feuerbach’s analysis of Hegel’s dialectic as a secularized theology, wherein the negation of the divine merely reinscribes it at a higher level of abstraction. For Marx, Hegel’s state philosophy perpetuates ideological mystification by naturalizing bourgeois property relations as the apotheosis of freedom, a charge Feuerbach had leveled against Hegel’s metaphysics. The convergence of their critiques underscores their shared debt to Hegel’s method, even as they repurposed it for antithetical ends.

Sigmund Freud, who adopted and advocated for Feuerbach’s critical views on religion early in life (nearly to the point of plagiarism), criticized Marxism for being self-deceptive in its claims to be a true materialism:

Marx's theory, such as that the development of social forms is a natural-historical process, or that the changes in social stratification emerge from each other on the path of a dialectical process. I am not at all sure that I understand these assertions correctly, nor do they sound "materialistic," but rather like a precipitation of that dark Hegelian philosophy through whose school Marx also passed. A critical examination of Marxist theory is forbidden, doubts about its correctness are punished as once heresy was punished by the Catholic Church. The works of Marx have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran as the source of a revelation, although they are said to be no more free from contradictions and obscurities than these older sacred books.

Freud’s critique exposes the quasi-religious fervor underlying Marxist orthodoxy, a paradox given Marx’s own dismissal of religion as ideological opium. This tension reflects the unresolved Hegelianism within Marxism: its dialectical narrative of history as a progressive unfolding toward communism replicates the teleological structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, albeit substituting class struggle for the Geist’s self-realization. Freud’s accusation that Marxism perpetuates Hegelianism in materialist garb underscores the difficulty of fully escaping the framework of one’s philosophical antecedents.

Ironically, this accusation of being a “fake materialist” is exactly the claim Marx made against Feuerbach in The German Ideology:

Insofar as Feuerbach is a materialist, history does not occur to him, and insofar as he takes history into consideration, he is not a materialist. With him, materialism and history fall completely apart, which, by the way, is already explained by what has been said.

Here, Marx indicts Feuerbach for failing to historicize material conditions, reducing human essence to a static “species-being” divorced from socioeconomic evolution. Yet Marx’s own materialism retains traces of Feuerbach’s anthropocentrism, particularly in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where alienation is framed as a distortion of human “species-life.” This unresolved tension between historical dynamism and essentialist anthropology reveals the limits of Marx’s attempt to transcend Feuerbach.

Feuerbach was not a bridge between Hegel and Marx—he built the foundation of Marx’s philosophy. The demythologized Hegelian dialectic Marx founded his entire ideology upon is lifted from Feuerbach. Marx famously wrote that "the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism," foreshadowing the replacement of the old religion with the new religion (Socialism and Communism). This rhetorical strategy, which recasts revolutionary praxis as a secularized soteriology, betrays Marx’s debt to Feuerbach’s project of theological transference. Where Feuerbach sought to reclaim divine predicates for humanity, Marx redirected them toward the proletariat, transforming eschatology into class struggle.

Both Marx and Feuerbach’s criticism of Hegel ring hollow, given their entire metaphysical worldview is borrowed word-for-word from Hegel, and merely simplified through the replacement of the Mystical with the Material, the Stoic with the Epicurean, and the Platonic with the Medieval-Aristotelian. Their attempts to secularize Hegel’s dialectic inadvertently replicated its structural logic, substituting historical materialism for absolute idealism while preserving the teleological drive toward an imminent end. The result was a philosophical palimpsest in which Hegel’s fingerprints remain visible beneath layers of materialist revisionism. Even Marx’s vaunted “inversion” of Hegel, touted as a revolutionary break, operated within the parameters of Hegelian methodology, privileging contradiction and synthesis as the engines of historical change. Thus, their critiques of Hegel function less as refutations than as heresies within the same theological tradition, reenacting the very dialectic they sought to dismantle.

Marx’s Critique of Feuerbach: Not Practical Enough

“The Real is the meaningful” Hegel

“The real is the sensuous…” Feuerbach

In an attempt to differentiate his philosophy from Feuerbach as well, Marx levied arguments against his contemporary and doppelgänger in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach and his more expansive 1844 Critique of Feuerbach. His 1845 The German Ideology is an extensive critique of Feuerbach. At first, he defends Feuerbach from his own enemies—the Young Hegelians—and then levies his own criticisms. Marx writes:

Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude.

Feuerbach’s great achievement is:

(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;

(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of the theory;

(3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.

This qualified praise reveals Marx’s strategic ambivalence: by positioning Feuerbach as both Hegel’s “conqueror” and a flawed materialist, Marx could claim to supersede him while appropriating his anthropological framework. The Theses on Feuerbach amplify this duality, framing Feuerbach’s materialism as a necessary but incomplete step toward praxis—a theoretical advance that nonetheless remains mired in contemplative passivity, unable to bridge the chasm between interpretation and transformation.

Later, he turns on Feuerbachian ethics as insufficient:

The main defect of all previous materialism—including Feuerbach's—is that the object, reality, sensuousness, is grasped only under the form of the object or of the view; but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjective. Hence it happened that the active side, in contrast to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since idealism, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects really distinct from thought-objects; but he does not conceive of human activity itself as representational activity. He therefore regards in the "Essence of Christianity" only the theoretical behavior as the genuinely human, while the practice is grasped and fixed only in its dirty Jewish manifestation. He therefore does not grasp the significance of the "revolutionary," the "practical-critical" activity.

Marx’s emphasis on praxis as the linchpin of historical materialism stems from his conviction that Feuerbach’s focus on “sensuous objects” neglects the transformative power of labor. For Marx, Feuerbach’s materialism remains trapped in the very idealism it seeks to dismantle, reducing human essence to a static “species-being” rather than a dynamic product of socioeconomic relations. The charge of “dirty Jewish manifestation” reflects Marx’s conflation of Feuerbach’s ethical passivity with what he perceived as Judaism’s transactional materialism—a problematic rhetorical move that underscores the tension between Marx’s revolutionary universalism and his Eurocentric biases. Ultimately, he considers himself superior to Feuerbach because he builds a specific economic system to bring about this cosmogonic reconciliation of man-to-man in an egalitarian society:

Feuerbach, however, has the great advantage over the "pure" materialists in that he sees how man, too, is a "sensuous object"; But apart from the fact that he grasps him only as a "sensuous object," not as a "sensuous activity," since here, too, he remains in theory, does not grasp men in their given social context… The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; but what matters is to change it.

Marx’s famous eleventh thesis—“The philosophers have only interpreted the world…”—encapsulates his rupture with Feuerbach, positioning revolutionary praxis as the telos of theory. Yet this rupture obscures their shared debt to Hegel’s dialectic: both sought to resolve alienation through a synthesis of human essence and material conditions, but where Feuerbach envisioned a spiritual reconciliation with nature, Marx demanded the overthrow of capitalist property relations. The shift from Feuerbach’s anthropological humanism to Marx’s historical materialism thus represents less a rejection than a radicalization of Hegelian teleology, substituting proletarian revolution for the Absolute’s self-realization.

Marx’s critique hinges on Feuerbach’s failure to historicize material conditions, a flaw he attributes to Feuerbach’s reliance on abstract “species-being” rather than concrete class struggle. For Marx, Feuerbach’s “sensuous object” remains a passive category, divorced from the socioeconomic forces that shape human subjectivity. By contrast, Marx’s “sensuous activity” embeds labor within a dialectical framework where production relations both condition and are transformed by human agency—a dynamic process Feuerbach’s static materialism could not conceptualize. This distinction underpins Marx’s insistence that true materialism must account for the historical development of productive forces, a thesis elaborated in Capital through the analysis of surplus value and exploitation.

The Young Hegelians, whom Marx initially defends Feuerbach against, serve as a foil for his critique. Figures like Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner had dismissed Feuerbach’s humanism as insufficiently radical, clinging to Hegelian abstraction while rejecting his materialism. Marx’s defense of Feuerbach against these critics is tactical: by acknowledging Feuerbach’s advances over Hegel, Marx positions himself as the dialectical synthesis of their conflict, transcending both idealism and passive materialism. Yet his subsequent turn against Feuerbach reveals the provisional nature of this alliance, as Marx sought to purge his own system of residual humanist essentialism.

Feuerbach’s influence on Marx’s early work is most evident in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where Marx frames alienation as the estrangement of labor under capitalism. Feuerbach’s concept of religious projection becomes, in Marx’s hands, a template for analyzing economic fetishism: just as God embodies alienated human virtues, commodities embody alienated labor. But where Feuerbach sought to reclaim divine predicates for humanity, Marx demanded the abolition of the conditions that necessitate such projections. This shift from reclamation to revolution marks the divergence of their projects, even as both remain tethered to Hegel’s dialectical method.

The tension between Marx and Feuerbach reflects a broader philosophical struggle over Hegel’s legacy. While Feuerbach sought to invert Hegel’s idealism by grounding philosophy in sensuous reality, Marx radicalized this inversion by embedding it in historical processes. For Marx, Feuerbach’s “contemplative materialism” replicates Hegel’s error of privileging theory over practice, leaving the material world intact rather than transforming it. Yet Marx’s own reliance on dialectical logic—the very framework he inherited from Hegel via Feuerbach—complicates his claim to have achieved a clean break, exposing the persistence of idealist structures within historical materialism.

Freud’s later critique of Marxism as a “Hegelian residue” finds eerie resonance in Marx’s treatment of Feuerbach. Just as Marx accused Feuerbach of retaining idealist abstractions, Freud accused Marx of smuggling teleological metaphysics into his materialist schema. Both critiques highlight the difficulty of fully escaping one’s philosophical antecedents: Marx’s historical materialism, for all its revolutionary pretensions, remains haunted by the dialectical ghosts of Hegel and Feuerbach, its claims to scientific objectivity undermined by its narrative of inevitable proletarian triumph.

The Theses on Feuerbach thus function as a manifesto for Marx’s mature philosophy, delineating the limits of Feuerbachian humanism while tacitly admitting its indispensability. By condemning Feuerbach’s neglect of praxis, Marx could position himself as the architect of a materialism capable of both interpreting and transforming the world. Yet this very condemnation reveals the paradox at Marxism’s core: its aspiration to scientific objectivity is perpetually undermined by its revolutionary eschatology, a tension that would plague Marxist movements from the Paris Commune to the Soviet experiment.

Marx’s critique of Feuerbach is less a refutation than a dialectical sublation (Aufhebung), preserving Feuerbach’s materialism while negating its passivity. The eleventh thesis’s call to “change the world” synthesizes Hegel’s historical teleology, Feuerbach’s humanism, and Marx’s economic analysis into a revolutionary imperative. Yet the failure of 20th-century Marxist regimes to achieve Feuerbach’s “man-to-man” reconciliation underscores the utopianism latent in this synthesis—a reminder that even the most rigorous materialism cannot fully escape the theological horizons it seeks to dismantle.

The Collapse of the Subject-Object Paradigm in Materialism

At the heart of Feuerbach's worldview was his materialist philosophy, which rejected the idea of a transcendent God or an immaterial soul. Instead, Feuerbach believed that everything that exists is material and can be studied through empirical observation—"Man is what he eats". His philosophy was quite robust, but this “classical atheist” naturalism is his enduring legacy, which has influenced Western society greatly, building the Dialectical Materialism of Marx, the Nihilism of Nietzsche, and the impetus of Social Darwinist movements of the 20th century. Feuerbach’s reduction of consciousness to biochemical processes prefigured the neuroscientific turn of the late 20th century, yet his insistence on empirical immediacy overlooked the emergent complexities of social structures, a blind spot Marx would later exploit in his critique of “contemplative materialism.”

Feuerbach was a classic Materialist on paper, in mimicry of Bayle, and adopted Cartesian rationality with the exemption of Descartes’ Mind-Body dichotomy. He rejected the idea of the existence of mind or consciousness apart from chemical processes. There are no “Gestalt” phenomena in Feuerbachian dialectics. He believed that the mind is simply a function of the brain and that there is no such thing as an immaterial soul, writing "The soul is the sum of the bodily functions” and rejecting any trans-personal consciousness, most notably the Hegelian Weltgeist. He believed that the study of the natural world was the key to understanding the human condition and that there was no need for metaphysical speculation, in a perfect inversion of Hegelianism. This radical empiricism positioned him as a bridge between Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century positivism, yet his dismissal of abstract systems paradoxically relied on the very dialectical frameworks he sought to dismantle.

In Feuerbach's most famous work, 1841 The Essence of Christianity, he argued that God is a human creation and that religious beliefs are projections of human values and desires, articulating a pure materialism and offering a reunion with nature as a method of escaping the inevitable Nihilism. Nietzsche would borrow his emphasis on the importance of the natural world, and man’s connection with it, but argue that mankind needs a much stronger antidote to the crushing Nihilism brought on by the death of God—an amoral, primordial return to a “will-to-power”, the opposite of “know thyself”. Feuerbach’s project, however, lacked Nietzsche’s tragic sensibility; where Nietzsche saw the void as an abyss demanding heroic affirmation, Feuerbach framed it as a liberation from ideological chains, a stance later critiqued by Kierkegaard for substituting communal humanism for individual transcendence.

Schopenhauer and Feuerbach sat in the same halls listening to Hegel. Schopenhauer was a professor at the University of Berlin, struggling in Hegel’s tall shadow, and Feuerbach even more so. Feuerbach’s career in philosophy was relatively short-lived. Feuerbach’s work was too deliberately unsystematic and disintegrated into the other philosophic positions competing at the time to garner much attention. Schopenhauer enjoyed moderate fame, especially due to Nietzsche’s obsession with his Pessimism. Schopenhauer, an out-and-proud Platonist, offered a lighter version than Nietzsche—a “will-to-life” as the solution. Schopenhauer also didn’t advocate for genocide of the weak like Nietzsche did, so he also has that going for him. Yet Feuerbach’s indirect influence proved more pervasive: his anthropological critique of religion permeated the secular humanism of the 20th century, shaping everything from Freud’s Future of an Illusion to Sartre’s existential atheism, albeit stripped of Feuerbach’s utopian collectivism.

Feuerbach’s rejection of the subject-object dichotomy resonated beyond philosophy, influencing the methodology of the nascent social sciences. By collapsing Hegel’s transcendental subject into the material conditions of human existence, he laid groundwork for Durkheim’s sociological positivism and Weber’s verstehen approach, which sought to reconcile empirical observation with interpretive meaning. However, his flat ontology—reducing all phenomena to tangible matter—struggled to account for cultural symbolism, a limitation later addressed by structuralists like Lévi-Strauss, who retained materialism while reintroducing abstract relational systems.

The political ramifications of Feuerbach’s thought were equally profound. His insistence that “man is the measure of all things” provided ideological fodder for both socialist egalitarianism and liberal individualism. While Marx weaponized Feuerbach’s humanism to critique capitalist alienation, figures like John Stuart Mill adapted his empiricism to defend utilitarian ethics, demonstrating the plasticity of his ideas. This duality underscores the tension in Feuerbach’s legacy: his philosophy could inspire revolutionary collectivism or atomized individualism, depending on the interpreter’s lens.

Feuerbach’s materialist ethics, though overshadowed by his religious critiques, quietly shaped biomedical discourse. His aphorism “Man is what he eats” anticipated the deterministic narratives of 19th-century physiology, where diet and environment were seen as moral determinants. This biologism, later distorted by Social Darwinists, revealed the dangers of extrapolating his materialism into rigid determinism—a trajectory Feuerbach himself might have rejected, given his emphasis on human agency in The Essence of Christianity.

Theologically, Feuerbach’s projection theory was a neo-epicureanism and nothing new. By attempting to reframe God as a mirror of human aspirations, he challenged theologians to either defend transcendence through existential experience (as Barth did) or embrace immanence (as Tillich later attempted through merging in Eastern Presuppositionalism through Heidegger). His work also indirectly influenced the “Death of God” movement, though its proponents, like Thomas J.J. Altizer, radicalized his ideas into a theology of divine absence rather than human presence.

Anti-Existentialism in Feuerbach

“[Feuerbach’s writings are] philosophy reduced to glandular secretions.”

Schelling

Feuerbach’s philosophy prefigures Nietzsche’s existential revolts not merely in its atheism but in its systematic dismantling of the metaphysical frameworks that underpin Western thought, foreshadowing Nietzsche’s twin antipathies toward Christ and Socrates. While Nietzsche never directly engages Feuerbach, his critique of Wagner’s intellectual vacillations reveals an implicit reckoning with Feuerbachian ideas. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche scorns Wagner’s earlier embrace of Feuerbach’s “healthy sensuality”—a slogan that galvanized the Junges Deutschland movement of the 1830s and 1840s—only to later retreat into Christian asceticism and medievalism, a betrayal Nietzsche interprets as a cowardly surrender to nihilism. Wagner’s eventual invocation of the “blood of the Redeemer” in Parsifal epitomizes, for Nietzsche, the hypocrisy of those who flirt with materialist liberation but lack the fortitude to endure the existential void left by God’s death. Feuerbach’s influence here is spectral yet undeniable: his insistence that religion projects human desires onto illusory transcendence forced Wagner—and by extension Nietzsche—to confront the unbearable lightness of a world stripped of divine meaning. Nietzsche’s disdain for Wagner’s regression mirrors his broader indictment of modernity’s failure to affirm life without theological crutches, a failure Feuerbach’s materialism diagnoses but cannot resolve, leaving Nietzsche to radicalize the critique into a Dionysian “will-to-power” that transcends Feuerbach’s humanistic naturalism Feuerbach foreshadows Nietzsche’s two great hatreds: Christ and Socrates Nietzsche never comments on Feuerbach directly, but he comments on Wagner’s adoption of Feuerbach’s concepts:

One remembers how enthusiastically Wagner at that time walked in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach: Feuerbach's word of the "healthy sensuality" - in the thirties and forties Wagner sounded like the word of salvation to many Germans (- they called themselves the "young Germans"). Did he finally change his mind about it? Since it seems, at least, that he finally had the will to re-learn about it... And not only with the Parsifal trombones from the stage - in the dull, just as unfree as helpless writing of his last years there are a hundred passages in which a secret wish and will, a despondent, uncertain, unconformable will betrays itself, to actually preach repentance, conversion, negation, Christianity, the Middle Ages and to tell his disciples "it is nothing! seek salvation elsewhere!" even the "blood of the Redeemer" is once called upon...

Kierkegaard, Feuerbach’s contemporary, published Either/Or in 1843, the same year Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity catalyzed Europe’s atheist turn. Though Kierkegaard shared Feuerbach’s contempt for Hegelian abstraction and Christendom’s hollow rituals, he rejected materialism’s reduction of human existence to deterministic processes. In his journals, Kierkegaard acknowledges Feuerbach’s incisive critique of institutional Christianity—particularly his exposure of the chasm between professed faith and lived hypocrisy—yet chastises him for conflating the existential leap of faith with mere intellectual assent. For Kierkegaard, Feuerbach’s error lies in his refusal to recognize that true Christianity demands a subjective, paradoxical relationship with the divine, irreducible to dogma or rational proof. Where Feuerbach reduces religion to anthropological projection, Kierkegaard insists that faith transcends empirical categories, inhabiting a realm of passionate inwardness inaccessible to Hegelian systematizers or materialist debunkers. This tension—between Feuerbach’s demand for ethical consistency and Kierkegaard’s defense of existential absurdity—exposes the fault line separating 19th-century materialism from existential theology, a divide that would widen as Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man grappled with the same abyss Feuerbach’s disenchantment had unveiled. Kierkegaard, a contemporary who published “Either/ Or” the same year Feuerbach published his critique of Christianity, defended the intent of Feuerbach while rejecting his Materialistic presuppositions. Kierkegaard hated Hegelianism, and rightly saw Marx and Feuerbach as thoroughly Hegelian:

On the whole, Borne, Heine, Feuerbach, and such authors are the individualities who have great interest for someone who is composing an imaginary construction. They frequently are well informed about the religious—that is, they know definitely that they do not want to have anything to do with it. This is a great advantage over the systematicians, who without knowing where the religious really is located take it upon themselves to explain it—sometimes obsequiously, sometimes superciliously, but always unsuccessfully. Feuerbach is saying: No, wait a minute — if you are going to be allowed to go on living as you are living, then you also have to admit that you are not Christians. Feuerbach has understood the requirements but cannot force himself to submit to them — ergo, he prefers to renounce being a Christian. And now, no matter how great a responsibility he must bear, he takes a position that is not unsound, that is, it is wrong of established Christendom to say that Feuerbach is attacking Christianity; it is not true, he is attacking the Christians by demonstrating that their lives do not correspond to the teachings of Christianity.

Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity, like those of Hegel, Kant, and Schopenhauer, remains ensnared in a distinctly Western dialectic, oscillating between Catholic sacramentality and Protestant rationalism while wholly neglecting the Eastern Orthodox tradition. This omission is no mere oversight but a symptom of the Enlightenment’s epistemological myopia, which reduced Christianity to a binary of ritualistic superstition versus privatized faith. Orthodox theology, with its apophatic emphasis on divine mystery and communal participation in the uncreated energies of God, offers a radical alternative to the subject-object dichotomy Feuerbach inherits from Luther’s sola scriptura. Kierkegaard, though no less Western in his orientation, intuits this deficiency when he lambasts Hegelianism for replacing lived faith with abstract speculation, a critique that parallels Orthodox objections to the West’s rationalist erosion of theosis. Feuerbach’s materialism, in this light, appears not as a rupture but as the inevitable terminus of Protestantism’s internal logic: by reducing revelation to textual interpretation and faith to cognitive assent, Luther unwittingly laid the groundwork for a secularism that would evacuate transcendence altogether. Feuerbach’s declaration that “he who has no more supernatural desires has no more supernatural beings” thus inverts Luther’s project, exposing how the Reformation’s demystification of sacraments and saints culminated in the disenchantment it sought to reform.

The trajectory from medieval scholasticism to militant atheism, as Feuerbach inadvertently maps it, is one of accelerating rationalization—a process Max Weber would later term the “disenchantment of the world.” Medieval Catholicism, with its Aristotelian synthesis of faith and reason, sought to systematize divine mystery, but Protestantism’s rejection of ecclesiastical mediation intensified this rationalizing impulse, reducing grace to a transactional calculus of sin and salvation. Feuerbach’s materialism completes this arc by dissolving the last vestiges of transcendence into immanent human needs, rendering God a mere cipher for communal aspirations. Yet this narrative, as Kierkegaard and the Orthodox tradition remind us, hinges on a peculiarly Western conflation of rationality with religious truth—a conflation foreign to Eastern Christianity’s apophatic ethos. Feuerbach’s atheism, then, is less a universal indictment of religion than a provincial critique of Christianity’s Faustian bargain with Enlightenment reason, a bargain that Orthodox theology refused to make. In this sense, Feuerbach’s “inevitability” is an illusion born of historical contingency, his militant atheism the logical endpoint of a specifically Western pathology that mistakes the death of a diminished God for the exhaustion of transcendence itself.

Feuerbach’s survey of the Christian Religion is locked in the same Catholic- Protestant false dichotomy as Hegel’s, Kant’s, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s are: none of them mention, across hundreds of thousands of pages of commentary on the Christian religion, ever mention the oldest and original remnant of Christianity- the Orthodox. And like the Orthodox, Kierkegaard decries the replacement of logos-rationality with the enlightenment rationalism, the conflation of Presuppositional belief with Zoetic relationship, and the reduction of faith to mere assent to axiomatic rationalism. This is one way to read Feuerbach: he is inevitable. Militant Atheism is the logical end of the Rationalization of Christianity initiated by Medieval Catholicism and perfected by Protestantism. Atheism is the awareness of the collapse of the Subject-Object paradigm initiated presuppositionally by Luther’s Sola Scriptura. Feuerbach inadvertently describes this process of rationalization-to-atheism: “He who has no more supernatural desires, has also no more supernatural beings”.

Feuerbach’s Anti-Metaphysical Metaphysics: The Myth of “Presuppositionless” Rationality 

"In Feuerbach, the individual must submit to the species, serve it. Feuerbach's species is Hegel's Absolute; it, too, exists nowhere."

Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Die deutsche Ideologie)

Feuerbach is often remembered as a radical critic of traditional metaphysics, most notably for his provocative claim that theology is, at root, anthropology. By inverting the Hegelian dialectic and replacing divine absolutes with human sensibilities, Feuerbach attempted to ground philosophical inquiry in the material and psychological conditions of human life. His assertion that God is a projection of the human essence marked a decisive turn toward a human-centered framework that sought to strip away the illusions of transcendence in favor of immanence. However, in his efforts to dismantle metaphysical systems, Feuerbach ultimately retained the very structures he aimed to dissolve—replacing the divine with the human, but preserving the metaphysical yearning for unity, truth, and meaning. His philosophy, though avowedly anti-metaphysical, remains driven by a deeply metaphysical telos rooted in humanistic idealism.

This contradiction has not gone unnoticed by subsequent thinkers. Freud appropriated Feuerbach’s anthropological demystification of religion, pushing it further into a psychological diagnosis of belief as neurosis. Nietzsche, similarly influenced, exposed the moral and existential consequences of dismantling metaphysical truth, suggesting that the “will to truth” itself may be a disguised will to death. Jung, however, responded by rejecting Feuerbach's reductionism, asserting that religious ideas are not merely projections but manifestations of archetypal patterns embedded in the collective unconscious. Each of these figures, in their own way, confronted the residual metaphysical weight in Feuerbach’s project. Despite his claims to have escaped metaphysical thinking, Feuerbach’s legacy reveals that even the most radical rejections of metaphysics can be haunted by the very structures they seek to overcome. Derrida later echoed this tension, revealing how even anti-metaphysical stances are entangled in the language and structures they oppose. Feuerbach’s humanism inadvertently demonstrated that the yearning for unity and meaning beyond the explanations of Newtonian Mechanistic Reductionism in his Species persists, whether clothed in divine or human guise.

While he dismantled theological metaphysics, his human-centric anti-theology retained an unresolved metaphysical yearning. By replacing God with an idealized human essence, he preserved the pursuit of unity, truth, and meaning—core concerns of the metaphysical tradition he aimed to critique. His vision of humanity reconciling with its "species-being" (Gattungswesen) through communal love and reason echoed the very universalism he sought to deconstruct. Thus, Feuerbach’s work straddles paradox: an avowedly materialist critique of religion that remains indebted to humanistic idealism, striving for transcendence through secular terms.

This contradiction resonated across subsequent philosophical discourse. Sigmund Freud extended Feuerbach’s anthropological critique into psychology, interpreting religion as a collective neurosis born of infantile helplessness. In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud framed belief in God as a wish-fulfilling illusion, a psychological crutch to cope with existential vulnerability. Yet where Feuerbach saw religion as a misguided celebration of human potential, Freud diagnosed it as a symptom of repression, urging humanity to relinquish such illusions in favor of rational self-mastery.

The Feuerbachian dialectic is still deeply Metaphysical in its Humanistic Telos. Feuerbach suffers from the same “promethean sin of historicity”, as Jung calls it, that all of the Anti-Metaphysicians suffer from. He argues, “My philosophy is no philosophy” in mimicry of the self-declared “traditionless tradition” of Protestantism. This self-deception of “everyone else has presuppositions and biases except me” continues today in both Postmodern Humanism and the Protestant Fundamentalism it arose from. Reality is experienced within deeply religious paradigms, and as those Platonic-Christian metaphysics fade with the advent of Materialism, so does the reason to live, or will-to-truth. Feuerbach notes "Religion is a dream, and it is only by faith in dreams that we can live". Nietzsche, in the Anti-Christ, notes the same:

“Will to truth" might be a hidden Will to Death… In this way the question: why science? leads back to the moral problem-what is the use of morality at all, if life, nature, history are "immoral"?... we recognize that we godless and anti-metaphysicians, also still take our fire from the fire kindled by a millennia-old faith, that Christian faith which was also Plato's faith that God is truth, that truth is divine.... But how, if this just becomes more and more implausible, if nothing more proves to be divine, except error, blindness, lies, - if God himself proves to be our longest lie?

Jung responds through Freud to Feuerbach. Like Feuerbach, Freud defines religion not as the a priori categories of the archetypical unconscious, but as mere presuppositional beliefs, as Protestants do. Freud's basic criticism of religion is lifted primarily from Feuerbach with obvious influences from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He essentially argued that belief in the supernatural was a mental disease. He makes a variety of arguments within three different areas, much like Nietzsche- Anthropologically, Ontogenetically and Phylogenetically. Freud's understanding of the genealogy of morality is nearly word-for-word Nietzsche's historical-Darwinian and later Phenomenological arguments. His last work before he died was an analysis of Moses, so despite his dismissal of religion, he became increasingly fixated on the Psychological nature of it. Jung, whom Freud had great respect for in his early years and intended to be his successor, broke with him on these views, seeing European Rationalism as the Psychosis. This schism between Jung and Freud mirrors the broader philosophical rift between those who seek to demystify religion through reductionism and those who recognize the irreducible archetypal forces shaping human cognition, a tension Feuerbach’s materialism fails to resolve. Where Freud reduced religious experience to neurotic sublimation, Jung saw in it the language of the collective unconscious—a realm Feuerbach dismissed as mere projection, yet one that persists as the substrate of all symbolic meaning. Jung’s depth psychology posited that religious symbols arise not merely from projected human traits but from archetypes of the collective unconscious—universal psychic structures transcending individual experience. To Jung, Feuerbach’s analysis was incomplete; religion expressed not illusion but the psyche’s innate capacity to grapple with existential mysteries through myth and symbol.

Jung was one of the great anti-ideologues of his century, in the same vein as Solzhenitsyn, Orwell and Dostoevsky. As Dostoevsky utilized the metaphor of the Gerasene Demoniac in his 1871 Psychological novel Бесы, Demons, to illustrate the "possessive" of socio-political ideologies, so Jung and Nietzsche described the presence of the Archetypes as a form of third-party control over the waking consciousness. The Anima/ Animus and the Dyonysian/ Appollarian are some of the para-temporal meta-personalities which drive unconscious realities, and drive religious expression. In other words, religion exists not in axiomatic, presuppositional forms, but symbolic psychological patterns which are impervious to surface-level beliefs. From Jung's Anti-Freudian Psychological perspective, it is precisely Agnosticism which is the Neurosis, an act of self-deception:

Agnosticism maintains that it does not possess any knowledge of God of anything metaphysical, overlooking the fact that one never possesses a metaphysical belief, but is always possessed by it.

Jung's warning that Modern society has only hidden their gods, not done away with them find resonance in Feuerbach's anti-theological theology:

His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food—and, above all, a large array of neuroses."  The lies have not vanished; they have multiplied. The “will-to-truth” Feuerbach championed, which Schopenhauer molded into "will-to-life" and Nietzsche into "will-to-power, in the absence of divine referents, a will-to-power over reality itself, as seen in transhumanist fantasies of technological immortality. The archetypes Jung identified— cosmogonic clashes between Apollonian order, Dionysian chaos—reemerge in today's deities Even the most secular ideologies, from Marxism to neoliberalism, function as crypto-theologies, their eschatologies promising salvation through revolution or markets. G.K. Chesterton phrased this succinctly: "Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

Freud’s dismissal of religion as collective neurosis, which he plagiarized directly from Feuerbach's Anthropology, now appears tragically myopic after the 20th century genocides performed in the name of Progress. The “mental disease” he diagnosed is, as Jung argued, the human condition itself—the psyche’s irreducible need to project meaning onto the void. Feuerbach’s reduction of religion to dream logic fails to explain why these dreams persist, why AI must be baptized in value-systems, or why quantum experiments still invoke the observer’s paradox. The answer lies in the archetypal substructure of consciousness, a realm Feuerbach’s materialism could not acknowledge, where the symbols of divinity are not inventions but discoveries, etched into the architecture of the mind.

Since the early 19th century, Science has routinely run into the problem that local reality cannot be observed without a priori assumptions. The field of Artificial Intelligence, for example, ran into this Mind-Body conundrum, which according to Feuerbach should not happen. A.I. is unable to interpret or act in the world without a priori Teleological assumptions about reality. Engineers have to program a literal religion into these AI for them to operate at all because there is no self-evident perception of reality. AI must be given value-meanings in order to operate at all, proving that the material world is not itself reality, but mere potentiality. Neo-Platonism is now a scientific reality proven by Neuroscience and demonstrated by AI, Quantum Physics. Object perception itself, in a strictly technical sense, is secondary to Teleological meaning. No default, obvious perception of reality exists; our material world is subject to an indefinite multiplicity of perceptual interpretation- Post-moderns are accidentally correct on this point, although their solution to this problem is self-defeating and simply a further development of the Nominalism committed by "Bible alone" Protestantism which Marx and Feuerbach were raised within.

The collapse of the subject-object paradigm, which Feuerbach celebrated as humanity’s liberation from metaphysical bondage, instead traps consciousness in a hall of mirrors. Quantum physics demonstrates that observation shapes reality, neuroscience reveals that belief structures neural pathways, and AI exposes the impossibility of value-neutral rationality. These discoveries force a reckoning with Jung’s assertion that “one never possesses a metaphysical belief, but is always possessed by it.” Feuerbach’s error was not in critiquing religion but in assuming humanity could exist outside the symbolic order—that the death of God would herald an age of unmediated reason, rather than a descent into fragmented mythologies competing for dominance. 

Hegel’s dialectic, which Feuerbach sought to invert, thus completes its circuit. The “presuppositionless” rationality of modernity, having slain the old gods, now births new ones: algorithms, particles, neurotransmitters. These idols demand as much faith as any deity, their priesthoods cloaked in lab coats and coding manuals. The tragedy is not that Feuerbach was wrong, but that he was half-right—religion is a dream, but so is materialism, and we are condemned to dream forever.

The Material Rationalist operating with a polished one-world rationality must now decide on what religious values do we code into AI, which completely undermines his worldview of reason alone being sufficient to self-evident reality. It turns the idea of the material world being a reality, and values/ religion are simply overlaid on top of it to create meaning. Rather, it is precisely the opposite; attention is actualized through value, an implicit and inevitable ethic, making super-rational values the utmost reality, and the material world the subordinate reality. Even in machines, religious values are inevitable. Hegel predicted this:

A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith…. The heartthrob for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction... it, therefore, speaks of the universal order as a perversion of the law of the heart and ist happiness, a perversion invented by fanatical priests, gluttonous despots, and their minions, who compensate themselves for their own degradation by degrading an oppressing others, a perversion which has led to the nameless misery of deluded mankind. (PS S 377)