Standing Feuerbach on His Head!

So I"m reading about these 19th century German philosophers so I can understand Jurgen Habermas better and today it is Feuerbach's turn and I really like this quote from the Stanford Online Encyclopedia on him so I thought I would requote it here.  Enjoy!

Feuerbach's 'The Essence of Christianity' - the allusive nature of the book is best accounted for if one understands that it is only intelligible against its Hegelian background; more particularly, The Phenomenology of Spirit. Not only does it recapitulate the theory of self-differentiation in that work but the central ideas of objectification, alienation, and reconciliation are drawn from it. Indeed, what made Feuerbach's book appear to be “the truth for our times” was that it enabled an entire generation of young intellectuals to appropriate the most important elements of Hegel's philosophy of Spirit without accepting his metaphysics and his endorsement of Christianity. Feuerbach, it is said, simply stood Hegel's philosophy of Spirit on its head.  

This is the part that I really like thought and for those with minds to know, it is the meaning of the poem at the top of my blog, where my soul might be, do you get it?


Just as Absolute Spirit achieved self-knowledge by objectifying itself in the finite world, so the finite spirit comes to self-knowledge by externalizing itself in the idea of God and then realizing that this externalization is only the form in which the human spirit discovers its own essential nature.

This is a pretty interesting idea of his as well, I guess is this part of his projection theory of religion

This “omnipotence of feeling” breaks through all the limits of understanding and manifests itself in several religious beliefs, all of which Feuerbach explored: the faith in providence, which is a form of confidence in the infinite value of one's own existence; faith in miracle, the confidence that the gods are unfettered by natural necessity and can realize one's wishes in an instant; and faith in immortality, the certainty that the gods will not permit the individual to perish.

This is also really good here too, is Nietzsche's death of God just this, his Neo-Feuerbachinism, taking Feuerbach to his logical conclusion, it's a possibility

Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As god has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God—the evil being—of religious fanaticism