Conspectus of Feuerbach’s Book
Lectures on the Essence of Religion

Conspectus of Feuerbach’s book “Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion” ( Lectures on the Essence of Religion ) is contained in a separate
notebook whose cover was not preserved. On the first page in abbreviated form is written L.
Feuerbach, Sämtliche Werke, Band 8, 1851; also indicated is the press-mark—8°. R. 807. There is no indication
exactly when the Conspectus was worked out by
Lenin. V. Adoratsky has suggested that it was written in 1909 ( Lenin Miscellany XII ). The following arguments speak in favour
of this hypothesis. It has been established that the press-mark on the first page of the Conspectus
is that of the French National Library (Paris) in which Lenin worked from January 13 to June 30,
1909. The contents of Lectures on the Essence of Religion borders upon those works of
Feuerbach that were used by Lenin in 1908 in writing his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism , and some of Lenin’s
remarks in the Conspectus are related to propositions formulated in his book. In the
Conspectus, for example, Lenin notes: [[Feuerbach and natural science!! NB. Cf. Mach and Co. today]] , and in
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism he writes: “The philosophy of the scientist Mach
is to science what the kiss of the Christian Judas was to Christ. Mach likewise betrays science into
the hands of fideism by virtually deserting to the camp of philosophical idealism.”
(V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ) Certain remarks in Lenin’s
Conspectus are also related to theses in his article “On the Attitude of a Working-Class Party to Religion,” written in May 1909.

Note that this document has undergone special formating to ensure that Lenin’s
sidenotes fit on the page, marking as best as possible where they were
located in the original manuscript.

L. FEUERBACH. COLLECTED WORKS , VOL. 8, 1851
LECTURES ON THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION

| | The preface is dated 1. I. 1851.—Feuerbach speaks here of the reasons why he did
not take part in the 1848 revolu- tion, which had “such a shameful, such a barren
end” (VII). [1] The revolution of 1848 had no Orts- und Zeitsinn, [2] the constitutionalists expected freedom
from the word des Herrn, [3] the republicans | | | | 8°. R. 807 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| | (VII-VIII) from their desire (“it was only necessary to desire a republic for it to come into
being”).... (VIII) “If a revolution breaks out again and I
take an active part in it, then you can ...
be sure that this revolution will be victorious, that Judgment Day for the monarchy and hierarchy has arrived.” (VII) | | | | Feuerbach
did not understand the 1848 revolution |
| | First lecture (1-11). |
| P. 2: | “We have had enough of political as
well as philosophical idealism; we now want to be political materialists.” | | | | Sic!! |
| |
| 3-4 | —Why Feuerbach fled to the
seclusion of the country: the break with the “gottesgläubigen Welt” [4] p. 4 |
| | (Z. 7 v. u. [5] ) (cf. p. 3 in
f. [6] )—to live with
“nature” (5), ablegen [7] all “überspannten” [8] ideas. | | | | down with
“Überspanntes”! |
| |
| 7-11 | Feuerbach gives an outline of his
works (7-9): History of modern philosophy (9-11 Spinoza, Leibnitz). |
| |
| | Second Lecture (12-20). |
| |
| 12-14 | —Bayle. |
| |
| 15: | Sinnlichkeit [9] for me means
“the true unity of the material and the spiritual, a unity not thought up
and prepared, but existing, and which therefore has the same significance as | | | | ‘sensuousness’ in
Feuerbach |
| | reality for me.” |
| |
| | Sinnlich [10] is not only
the Magen, [11] but also the Kopf [12] (15). |
| |
| (16-20: | Feuerbach’s work on Immortality:
paraphrased.) |
| |
| | Third Lecture (21-30). |
| |
| | The objection was raised to my Essence of
Christianity [13] that for me man does not depend on anything, “there was opposition
to this alleged deification of man by me.”
(24) “The being, whom man presupposes ...
is nothing other than nature , not your
God.” (25) |
| |
| | “The unconscious being of nature is for
me the eternal being, without origin, the first being, but first in point of time, and
not in point of rank, the physically but not morally first being....” (27) |
| |
| | My denial includes also affirmation....
“It is, of course, a consequence of my doctrine that there is no God” (29), but this
follows from the conception of the essence of God (=an expression of the essence
of nature, of the essence of man). |
| |
| | Fourth Lecture. |
| |
| | “The feeling of dependence is the basis
of religion.” (31) (“Furcht” [14] 33-4-5-6) |
| |
| | “The so-called speculative philosophers
are ... those philosophers who do not construct their notions in accordance with
things, but rather construct things according to their notions.” (31) | | | | cf. Marx
und Engels [15] |
| |
| | (Fifth Lecture). |
| |
| | — it is especially death that arouses
fear, belief in God. (41) |
| |
| | “I hate the idealism that divorces man
from nature; I am not ashamed of my dependence on nature.” (44) |
| |
| | “As little as I have deified man in Wesen
des Christenthums , a deification with which
I have been stupidly reproached ... so little do I want to deify nature in the sense
of theology....” (46-47) |
| |
| | Sixth Lecture — The cult of animals (50
u. ff. [16] ). |
| |
| | “What man is dependent on is ... nature,
an object of the senses ... all the impressions which nature makes on man through the
senses ... can become motives of religious veneration.” (55) |
| |
| | (Seventh Lecture.) |
| |
| | By egoism I understand, not the egoism
of the “philistine and bourgeois” (63), but the philosophical principle of conformity
with nature, with human reason, against “theological hypocrisy, religious and speculative fantasy, political despotism.” (63
i. f.) Cf. 64 very important . | | | | “egoism” and
its significance |
| |
| | Idem 68 i. f. and 69 i. f. — Egoism (in the
philosophical sense) is the root of religion. |
| |
| (70: | Die Gelehrten [17] can only be
beaten with their own weapons, i.e., by quotations) ... “man die Gelehrten nur
durch ihre eigenen Waffen, d. h.
Zitate, schlagen kann....” (70) |
| |
| | Incidentally, on p. 78 Feuerbach uses
the expression: Energie d. h. Thätigkeit. [18] This is worth noting. There is, indeed,
a subjective moment in the concept of ener- gy, which is absent, for example, in the
concept of movement. Or, more correctly, in the concept or usage in speech of the
concept of energy there is something that excludes objectivity. The energy of the
moon (cf.) versus the movement of the moon. | | | | on the
question of the word energy |
| |
| 107 | i. f. ...“Nature is a primordial, primary and final being....” |
| |
| 111: | ... “For me ... in philosophy ... the
sensuousness is primary; but primary not merely in the sense of speculative
philosophy, where the primary signifies that beyond the bounds of which
it is necessary to go, but primary in the sense of not being derived, of
being self-existing and true.” | | | | the sensuousness
=the prima- ry, the selfexisting and true |
| |
| | ...“The spiritual is nothing outside
and without the sensuous.” |
| |
| NB | in general p. 111 ... “the truth
and essentiality (NB) of the senses, from which ... philosophy ... proceeds....” |
| |
| 112 ... | “Man thinks only by means of his
sensuously existing head, reason has a firm sensuous foundation in the
head, the brain, the focus of the senses.” | | |
| |
| | See p. 112 on the veracity (Urkunden [19] )
of the senses. | See p. 112 on the veracity (Urkunden [19] )
of the senses. |
| See p. 112 on the veracity (Urkunden [19] )
of the senses. |
| 114: | Nature=the primary, unableitbares,
ursprüngliches Wesen. [20] | | | | NB ˘ |
| | “Thus, Die Grundsätze der
Philosophie is interconnected with the Wesen der Re- ligion .” [21] (113) | |
| |
| | “I deify nothing, consequently not even
nature.” (115) |
| |
| 116 | — Answer to the reproach that Feuerbach does not give a definition of
nature : |
| |
| | “I understand by nature the totality of all sensuous forces, things and
beings which man distinguishes from |
| | himself as not human.... Or, if the
word is taken in practice: nature is everything that for man—independent of the supernatural whisperings | | | | It turns out
that nature= everything except the |
| | of theistic faith—proves to be immediate and sensuous, the basis and
object of his life. Nature is light, electricity, magnetism, air, water,
fire, earth, animal, plant, man, in- | | | | supernatural.
Feuerbach is brilliant but not profound.
Engels defines |
| | sofar as he is a being acting involuntarily and unconsciously—by the word
‘nature’ I understand nothing more than this, nothing mystical, nothing
nebulous, nothing theological” (above:
in contrast to Spinoza). | | | | more profound- ly the distinction between
materialism and idealism. |
| |
| | ...“Nature is ... everything that you see
and that is not derived from human hands and thoughts. Or if we penetrate into the
anatomy of nature, nature is the being, or totality of beings and things, whose
appearances, expressions or effects, in which precisely in their existence and essence are
manifested and consist, have their basis not in thoughts or intentions and decisions
of the will, but in astronomical, or cosmic, mechanical, chemical, physical, physiological or organic forces or causes.” (116-117) |
| |
| | [Here too it amounts to opposing matter
to mind, the physical to the psychical.]
121 — against the argument that there must be a prime cause (= God). |
| |
| | “It is only man’s narrowness and love of
convenience that cause him to put eternity in place of time, infinity in place of the
endless progress from cause to cause, a stat- ic divinity in place of restless nature,
eternal rest instead of eternal movement.”
(121 i. f.) |
| |
| 124- | 125 Owing to their subjective needs, men
replace the concrete by the ab- stract, perception by the concept, the many by the one,
the infinite Σ [22] of causes by the single cause. |
| |
| | Yet, “no objective validity and existence, no existence outside ourselves” must
be ascribed to these abstractions. (125) | | | | objectiv = außer uns [23] |
| |
| | ...“Nature has no beginning and no end.
Everything in it is in mutual interaction, everything is relative, everything at once
effect and cause, everything in it is allsided and reciprocal....” (129) |
| |
| | there is no place there for God (129-130;
simple arguments against God). |
| |
| | ...“The cause of the first and general
cause of things in the sense of the theists, theologians and so-called speculative philosophers is man’s understanding....” (130) “God is ... cause in
general, the concept of cause as essence personified and become independent....”
(131) |
| |
| | “God is abstract nature, i.e., nature removed from sensuous perception, mentally
conceived, made into an object or being |
| | of the understanding; nature in the proper
sense is sensuous, real nature, as immediately manifested and presented to us by
the senses.” (133) | | | | immediately |
| |
| | The theists see in God the cause of the
movement in nature (which they make into a dead mass or matter). (134) The power of
God, however, is in reality the power of nature (Naturmacht: 135). |
| |
| | ...“Indeed it is only through their effects
that we perceive the properties of things....”
(136) |
| |
| | Atheism (136-137) abolishes neither das
moralische Über (= das Ideal) [24] nor das natürliche
Über (= die Natur.) [25] |
| |
| | ...“Is not time merely a form of the
world, the manner in which particular beings and effects follow one another? How
then can I ascribe a temporal beginning to the world?” (145) | | | | time and
world |
| |
| | ...“God is merely the world in thought....
The distinction between God and the world is merely the distinction between spirit
and sense, thought and perception....” (146) |
| |
| | God is presented as a being existing out- |
| | side ourselves. But is that not precisely
an admission of the truth of sensuous being?
Is it not (thereby) “recognised that there is no being outside sensuous being? For,
apart from sensuousness, have we any other sign, any other criterion, of an existence outside ourselves, of an existence independent of thought?” (148) | | | | being outside
ourselves = independent of thought |
| |
| | ...“Nature ... in isolation from its materiality and corporeality ... is God....” (149) | | | | NB
nature outside, independent of matter = God |
| |
| | “To derive nature from God is equivalent | | | | NB |
| | to wanting to derive the original from the
image, from the copy, to derive a thing | | | | theory of
‘the copy’ |
| | from the thought of the thing.” (149) |
| |
| | Characteristic of man is Verkehrtheit (149
i. f.) verselbständigen [26] abstractions—
for example, time (150) and space : |
| | “Although ... man has abstracted space
and time from spatial and temporal things, nevertheless he presupposes those as the
primary grounds and conditions of the latter’s existence. Hence he thinks of the
world, i.e., the sum-total of real things, matter, the content of the world, as having
its origin in space and time. Even Hegel makes matter arise not only in, but out of, |
| | space and time....” (150)
“Also, it is really incomprehensible why time, separated from temporal things, should not
be identified with God.” (151) | | | | time outside temporal
things = God |
| |
| | ...“In reality, exactly the opposite holds
good, ...it is not things that presuppose space and time, but space and time that
presuppose things, for space or extension | | | | time and
space |
| | presupposes something that extends, and
time, movement, for time is indeed only a concept derived from movement, presupposes something that moves. Everything is
spatial and temporal....” (151-152) |
| |
| | “The question whether a God has created
the world ... is the question of the relation of mind to sensuousness” (152—the most
important and difficult question of philos- | | | | cf. Engels
idem in Ludwig Feuerbach [27] |
| | ophy, the whole history of philosophy
turns on this question (153)—the conflict between the Stoics and the Epicureans,
the Platonists and the Aristotelians, the
Sceptics and the Dogmatists, in ancient philosophy; between the nominalists and | | | | 153 |
| | realists in the Middle Ages; between the
idealists and the “realists or empiricists” | |
| | (sic! 153) in modern times. |
| |
| | It depends in part on the nature of people
(academic versus practical types) whether they incline to one or another philosophy. | | | | 153 |
| |
| | “I do not deny ... wisdom, goodness,
beauty; I deny only that, as such generic notions, they are beings, whether in the
shape of gods or properties of God, or as
Platonic ideas, or as self-posited Hegelian concepts....” (158)—they exist only as properties of men. | | | | (materialism)
contra theology and idealism (in theory ) |
| |
| | Another cause of belief in God: man
transfers to nature the idea of his own purposive creation. Nature is purposive—
ergo it was created by a rational being. (160) |
| |
| | “That which man calls the purposiveness
of nature and conceives as such is in reality nothing but the unity of the world,
the harmony of cause and effect, the interconnection in general in which everything in nature exists and acts.” (161) |
| |
| | ...“Nor have we any grounds for imagining that if man had more senses or organs
he would also cognise more properties or things of nature. There is nothing more
in the external world, in inorganic nature, than in organic nature. Man has just as
many senses as are necessary for him to conceive the world in its totality, in its
entirety.” (163) | | | | If man had more senses, would he
discover more things in the world? No. |
| |
| | important against agnosticism | important against agnosticism | | | |
| important against agnosticism |
| |
| 168 | —Against Liebig on account of the
phrases about the “infinite wisdom” (of God).... [[Feuerbach and
natural science!! NB. Cf. Mach and Co. [28] today.]] [Back to top] |
| |
| 174- | 175-178—Nature = a republican;
God = a monarch. [This occurs not only once in Feuerbach!] |
| |
| 188- | 190—God was a patriarchal monarch,
and he is now a constitutional monarch:
he rules, but according to laws. |
| |
| | Where does spirit (Geist) come from?—
ask the theists of the atheist. (196) They have too disdainful (despektierliche: 196) |
| | an idea of nature, too lofty an idea
of spir- it (zu hohe, zu vornehme (!!)
Vorstel- lung [29] ). | | | | NB (cf. Dietzgen) [30] |
| |
| | Even a Regierungsrath [31] cannot be
directly explained from nature. (197) | | | | witty! |
| |
| | “The spirit develops together with the
body, with the senses ... it is connected with the senses ... whence the skull, whence
the brain, thence also the spirit; whence an organ, thence also its functioning” ((197):
cf. above (197) “the spirit is in the head ”). |
| |
| | “Mental activity is also a bodily activi-
ty.” (197-198) | | | | Idem Dietzgen [32] |
| |
| | The origin of the corporeal world from the |
| | spirit, from God, leads to the creation of
the world from nothing—“for whence does the spirit get the matter, corporeal substances, if not from nothing?” (199) | | | |
| |
| | ...“Nature is corporeal, material, sensuous....” (201) | | | | nature
is material |
| |
| | Jakob Boehme = a “ materialistic
theist ” (202): he deifies not only the mind but also matter. For him God is material—therein lies his mysticism. (202) | | | | } |
| |
| | ...“Where the eyes and hands begin, there
the gods end.” (203) |
| |
| | (The theists) have “blamed matter or
the inevitable necessity of nature ... for the evil in nature” (212) | | | | the necessity
of nature |
| |

| |
| --- |
| | 213 in the middle and 215 in the middle “natürliche” und “bürgerliche
Welt.” [33] | | | | | | | | a germ of historical materialism |

| |
| --- |
| (226): | Feuerbach says that he is ending
the first part here (on nature as the basis of religion) and passing to the second
part: the qualitities of the human spir- it are manifested
in Geistesreligion. [34] |
| |
| (232)— | “Religion is poetry”—it can be said,
for faith = fantasy. But do I (Feuerbach) not then abolish poetry? No. |
| |
| | I abolish (aufhebe) religion “only insofar ” (Feuerbach’s italics) “as it is not poetry, but ordinary prose.” (233) | | | | NB |
| |
| | Art does not require the recognition of
its works as reality . (233) |
| |
| | Besides fantasy, of great importance in
religion are das Gemüth [35] (261), the prac- tical aspect (258), the search
for the better, for protection, help, etc. |
| |
| | (263)—In religion one seeks consolation (atheism is alleged to be trostlos [36] ).— — — |
| |
| | “A concept, however, congenial to man’s
self-love, is that nature does not act with immutable necessity, but that above the
necessity of nature is ... a being that loves mankind.” (264) And in the next
sentence “Naturnotwendigkeit” [37] of the falling of a stone. (264) | | | | the necessity
of nature |
| |
| p. 287 | twice in the
middle: likewise “Notwendigkeit der
Natur.” [38] | | | | NB |
| |
| | Religion = childishness, the childhood
of mankind (269), Christianity has made a god of morality , it has created a moral
God . (274) |
| |
| | Religion is rudimentary education—one |
| | can say: “education is true
religion....” (275) “However, this is ... a misuse of words, for superstitious
and inhuman ideas are always linked with the word religion.” (275) | | | | Feuerbach
against misuse of the word religion |
| |
| | Eulogy of education —(277). |
| |
| | “ Superficial view and
assertion ... that religion is absolutely of no concern to life, namely to public, political
life.” (281) | | | | NB |
| | I would not give a farthing for a
political freedom that allows man to be a slave of religion. (281) |
| |
| | Religion is innate in man (“this statement ... simply means”) = superstition is
innate in man. (283) |
| |
| | “The Christian has a free cause of nature,
a lord of nature, whose will, whose word, nature obeys, a God who is not bound by the
so-called causal nexus, by necessity, by the chain which links effect to cause and cause |
| | to cause, whereas the heathen god is
bound by the necessity of nature and cannot save even his favourites from the fatal
necessity of dying.” (301) (Thus Feuerbach says sys- | | | | the necessity
of nature

[NB] |
| | tematically: Notwendigkeit der Natur.) |
| |
| | “The Christian, however, has a free
cause because in his wishes he is not bound by the interconnection of nature, nor by the
necessity of nature.” (301) ((And three times more on this page. Notwendig- | | | | [NB] |
| | keit der Natur.)) |
| |
| | And p. 302: “...all the laws or natural
necessities to which human existence is subjected....” (302) | | | | [NB] |
| |
| | | cf. 307: “Lauf der Natur.” [39] |
| |
| | “To make nature dependent on God, means
to make the world order, the necessity of nature, dependent on the will.” (312) And | | | | [NB] |
| | p. 313 (above)—“Naturnotwendigkeit”!! |
| |
| 320: | “necessity of nature” (der Natur)... |
| |
| | In religious ideas “we have ... exampleshow in general man converts the subjective into the objective, that is to say, he makes
that which exists only in his thought only in his thought, conception, imagination into
something existing outside thought, | | | | what is the objective ?
(according to
Feuerbach) |
| | conception,
imagination ....” (328) |
| |

| | “So Christians tear the spirit, the soul,
of man out of his body and make this torn-out, disembodied spirit into their God.”
(332) | | | | | Entleibter Geist [40] = God |

| |
| --- |
| | Religion gives (332) man an ideal. Man
needs an ideal, but a human ideal corresponding to nature and not a supernatural
ideal: |
| |
| | “Let our ideal be no castrated, disembodied, abstract being, let our ideal be the
whole, real, all-sided, perfect, developed man.” (334) |
| |
| | Mikhailovsky’s ideal is
only a vulgarised repetition of this ideal of advanced bourgeois
democracy or of revolutionary bourgeois democracy. | | |
| |
| | “Man has no idea, no conception, of
any other reality, of any other existence, than sensuous, physical existence....”
(334) | | | | Sinnlich physisch [41] ((excellent equating!)) |
| |
| | “If one is not ashamed to allow the sensuous, corporeal world to arise from the
thought and will of a spirit, if one is not |
| | ashamed to assert that things are not
thought of because they exist, but that they exist because they are thought of; | | | | NB |
| | then let one also not be ashamed to allow
things to arise from the word; then let one also not be ashamed to assert that words
exist not because things exist, but that things exist only because words exist.”
(341-342) |
| |
| | A God without the immortality of the
soul of man is only a God in name: |
| |
| | ...“Such a God is ... the God of some
rationalist natural scientists, who is nothing but personified nature or natural
necessity, the universe, with which of course the idea of immortality is incompatible.” |
| |
| | 349 | 349 |
| 349 |
| |
| | The last (30th) lecture, pp. (358-370),
could be put forward almost in its entirety as a typical example of an enlightening
atheism with a socialist tint (concerning the mass that suffers want, etc., p. 365
middle), etc. Final words: it was my task to make you, my hearers, |
| |
| | “from friends of God into friends of man,
from men of faith into thinkers, from men of prayer into workers, from candidates
for the beyond into students of this world, |
| | from Christians, who, as they themselves
acknowledge and confess, are ‘ halfbeast, half-angel, ’ into men, whole men”
(370 end). | | | | Feuerbach’s italics |
| |
| | |
| |
| | Here there are many details, quotations,
which contain repetitions. I pass over all that. I note only the most important of
that which affords some interest: the basis of morality is egoism (392). (“Love
of life, interest, egoism”)... “there is |
| | not only a singular or personal, but
also a social egoism, a family egoism, a corporation egoism, a community egoism,
a patriotic egoism.” (393) | | | | A germ of historical
materialism! |
| |
| | ...“The good is nothing but that which
corresponds to the egoism of all men....”
(397) |
| |
| | “One has only to cast a glance at history! |
| | Where does a new epoch in history begin?
Only wherever an oppressed mass or majority makes its well-justified egoism effective against the exclusive egoism of a nation or caste, wherever classes of men (sic!)
or whole nations, by gaining victory over | | | | NB
NB
A germ of historical materialism, cf. Cherny- |
| | the arrogant self-conceit of a patrician minority, emerge into the light of historical
glory out of the miserable obscurity of | | | | shevsky [42] |
| | the proletariat. So, too, the egoism of the
now oppressed majority of mankind must and will obtain its rights and found a new
epoch in history. It is not that the aristoc- | | | | NB
Feuerbach’s “socialism” |
| | racy of culture, of the spirit, must be abolished; no indeed! it is merely that not
just a handful should be aristocrats and all others plebeians, but that all should—
at least should —be cultured; it is not that property in general should be abolished;
no indeed! it is merely that not just a handful should have property, and all others
nothing; all should have property.” (398) |
| |
| | These lectures were delivered from
1.XII.1848 to 2.III.1849 (Preface,
p. V), and the preface to the book
is dated 1.I.1851. How far, even at this time (1848-1851), had Feuerbach lagged behind Marx ( The Communist Manifesto 1847, Neue Rheinische Zeitung ,
etc.) and Engels (1845: Lage [43] ) | |
| |
| | Examples from the classics of the use
of the words God and nature without distinction. (398-399) |
| |
| | Pp. 402-411 —an excellent , philosophical (and at the same time simple and clear)
explanation of the essence of religion. | | |
| |
| | “In the final analysis, the secret of
reli- gion is only the secret of the combination in one and the same being of
consciousness with the unconscious, of the will with the involuntary.” (402). The Ego and the non- | | | | NB |
| | Ego are inseparably connected in man.
“Man does not grasp or endure the depths of his own being and therefore splits it into
an 'Ego’ without a ‘non-Ego,’ which he | | | | NB |
| | calls God, and a ‘non-Ego’ without an
‘Ego,’ which he calls nature.” (406) |
| |
| | P. 408—an excellent quotation from Seneca (against the atheists) that they make nature
into a god. Pray!—Work! [44] (p. 411) |
| |
| | Nature is God in religion, but nature |
| | as Gedankenwesen. [45] “ The secret of religion is ‘the identity of the
subjective and objective,’ i. e., the unity of the being | | | | NB |
| | of man and nature, but as distinct from the
real being of nature and mankind.” (411) |
| |
| | “Human ignorance is bottomless and the
human force of imagination is boundless; the power of nature deprived of its foundation by ignorance, and of its bounds
by fantasy, is divine omnipotence.” (414) | | | | Sehr gut! |
| |
| | ...“Objective essence as subjective, the
essence of nature as different from nature, as human essence, the essence of man as | | | | Sehr gut! |
| | different from man, as non-human essence— |
| | that is the divine being, that is the essence
of religion, that is the secret of mysticism and speculation....” (415) | | | | an excellent
passage! |
| | Speculation in Feuerbach = idealist philosophy. NB. | |
| |
| | “Man separates in thought the adjective |
| | from the substantive, the property from
the essence.... And the metaphysical God is nothing but the compendium, the totality of the most general properties extracted
from nature, which, however, man by means of the force of imagination—and
indeed in just this separation from sensuous being, matter, nature—reconverts
into an independent subject or being.” | | | | NB profoundly
correct!
NB |
| | (417) |
| |
| | The same role is played by Logic (( 418 )— obviously Hegel is
meant)—which converts das Sein, das Wesen [46] into a special
real- ity—“how stupid it is to want to make |
| | metaphysical existence into a physical one,
subjective existence into an objective one, and again logical or abstract existence into
an illogical real existence!” (418) | | | | Excellent (against
Hegel and idealism) |
| |
| | ...“Is there, therefore, an eternal gulf
and contradiction between being and thinking?’ Yes, but only in the mind; however
in reality the contradiction has long been resolved, to be sure only in a way corresponding to reality and not to your school
notions, and, indeed, resolved by not fewer than five senses.” (418) | | | | beautifully
said! |
| |
| 428: | Tout ce qui n’est pas Dieu, n’est
rien, i.e., tout ce qui n’est pas Moi, n’est rien. [47] | | | | bien dit! |
| |
| 431 | -435. A good quotation from Gassendi.
A very good passage: especially 433 God = a collection of adjectival words
(without matter) about the concrete and the abstract. | | | | NB |
| |
| | 435 “The head is the house of representa- | 435 | | | | NB |
| 435 |
| | tives of the universe”—and if our | | | |
| | heads are stuffed with
abstractions, Gattungsbegriffen, [48] then of course we
derive (ableiten) “the individual from the universal, i.e., ... nature from God.” | | | | the individual
and the universal = Na- ture and God |
| |
| 436- | 437: (Note No. 16.) I am not against
constitutional monarchy, but only the democratic republic is
“‘ immediately reasonable’ as the form of state ‘cor- responding to the
essence of man.’” | | | | ha-ha!! |
| |
| | ...“The clever manner of writing consists,
among other things, in assuming that the reader also has a mind, in not expressing
everything explicitly, in allowing the read- er to formulate the relations, conditions
and restrictions under which alone a proposition is valid and can be conceived.”
(447) | | | | hits the mark! |
| |
| | Interesting is the answer to (Feuerbach’s)
critic Professor von Schaden (448-
449) and to Schaller . (449-450-463) |
| |
| | ...“I do indeed expressly put nature in
place of being, and man in place of thinking,” i.e., not an abstraction, but
something concrete— — —die dramatische Psycholo- gie. [49] (449) | | | | NB
“being and nature,” “thinking and man” |
| |
| | That is why the term “the anthropological principle” in philosophy, [50] used by Feuerbach and Chernyshevsky, is nar- row . Both the anthropological
principle and naturalism are only inexact, weak descriptions of materialism . | |
| |
| | “Jesuitism, the unconscious original and
ideal of our speculative philosophers.” (455) | | | | bien dit! |
| |
| | “Thinking posits the discreteness of reality as a continuum, the infinite multiplicity of life as an identical singularity.
Knowledge of the essential, inextinguishable difference between thought and life (or
reality) is the beginning of all wisdom in thinking and living. Only the distinction is here the true connection.” (458) | | | | concerning
the question of the fundamentals of philosophical materialism |
| |
| End of Volume 8 |
| |
| | Volume 9 = “ Theogony ”
(1857). [51] There does not seem to be anything of interest here, to judge from
skimming over the pages. Incidentally, p. 320, Pars. 34, 36 (p. 334) and following should be
read. NB Par. 36 (p. 334)—on looking through it, nothing appears to be of
interest. Quo- tations, and again quotations, to confirm what Feuerbach has already said. |

---
Notes:
[1] Feuerbach, L.,
Sämtliche Werke , Bd. 8, Leipzig, 1851.— Ed.

[2] sense of place and
time— Ed.

[3] of the
monarch— Ed.

[4] “God-believing
world”— Ed.

[5] Zeile 7 von unten—line
7 from bottom— Ed.

[6] at the
end— Ed.

[7] to
discard— Ed.

[8]
“extravagant”— Ed.

[9]
sensuousness — Ed.

[10]
sensuous— Ed.

[11]
stomach— Ed.

[12] head— Ed.

[13] Das Wesen des Christentums ( The Essence of Christianity ) by L. Feuerbach was
published in 1841. In this work, Feuerbach takes a firm materialist position in philosophy.

[14]
“fear”— Ed.

[15] The reference is to The Holy Family by Frederick Engels and Karl Marx,
in which the authors wrote that Feuerbach outlined “in a masterly manner the general basic features of Hegel’s speculation and hence
of every kind of metaphysics. ” (Marx and Engels, The Holy Family , Moscow, 1956,
pp. 186-187.)

[16] und folgende—et
seq.— Ed.

[17] the
pundits— Ed.

[18] energy, i.e.,
activity— Ed.

[19]
evidence— Ed.

[20] underivable primordial
being— Ed.

[21] Das Wesen der Religion ( The Essence of Religion ) by
L. Feuerbach was published in 1846. Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft ( Principles of the Philosophy of the Future ) was
published in 1843.

[22]
summation— Ed.

[23] objective = outside
ourselves— Ed.

[24] the moral highest (= the ideal)— Ed.

[25] the natural highest (= nature)— Ed.

[26] perversity of endowing
abstractions with independence— Ed.

[27] The reference is to the
well-known passage on the basic question of philosophy in Engels’ book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
(see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, pp. 369-370).

[28] Lenin contrasts here the
attitude toward natural science of Feuerbach, the materialist, and of Mach, the subjective idealist. A
critical evaluation of Mach’s attitude toward natural science is given by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (see V. I. Lenin,
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Moscow, 1960, pp. 363-364).

[29] too lofty, too noble (!!)
an idea— Ed.

[30] Josef Dietzgen developed
analogous ideas. For example, in the book The Nature of the Workings of the Human Mind ( Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 1, Stuttgart,
1922), in the paragraph “Spirit and
Matter,” he wrote: “Long ago, mainly during early Christianity, it became customary to
look with disdain upon material, sensual and carnal things, which become moth-eaten and rusty”
(p. 53).

[31] a state
counsellor— Ed.

[32] Josef Dietzgen wrote as
follows in The Nature of the Workings of the Human Mind ( Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 1,
Stuttgart, 1922), in the chapter “Pure Reason or the Capacity to Think in General”:
“Thinking is a function of the brain, just as writing is a function of the hand” (p. 11) and
further “... the reader will not misunderstand me when I call the capacity to think a material
power, a sensuous phenomenon ” (p. 13).

[33] the “natural”
and “civil world”— Ed.

[34] spiritual
religion— Ed.

[35]
feeling— Ed.

[36]
comfortless— Ed.

[37] “natural
necessity”— Ed.

[38] “necessity of
nature”— Ed.

[39] “course of
nature”— Ed.

[40] disembodied
spirit— Ed.

[41] sensuous,
physical— Ed.

[42] See Lenin’s notations in
Plekhanov’s book N. G. Chernyshevsky (pp.
537-538, 540, 545, 546, 551-552 and 554 of this volume).

[43] Neue Rheinische Zeitung ( New Rhine Gazette )
was published by Marx in Cologne from June 1, 1848 to May 19, 1849.

Engels’ book The Condition of the Working Class in England was published in
1845. Regarding the significance of this book, see
V. I. Lenin, pres. ed., Vol. 2, Moscow, 1960,
pp. 22-23.

[44] Lenin is referring to the
following passage in Feuerbach’s book
Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion. Werke, Bd. 8, 1851, S. 411
( Lectures on the Essence of Religion, ) Works, Vol. 8, 1851, p. 411):
“... godliness consists, so to speak, of two component parts, of which one belongs to man’s
fantasy, the other to nature. Pray!—says one part, i.e., God, distinct from nature; work!—says
the other part, i.e., God, not distinct from nature, but merely expressing its Essence; for nature is the
working bee, Gods—the drones.”

[45] thought
entity— Ed.

[46] being,
essence— Ed.

[47] All that is not God is
nothing, i.e., all that is not I is nothing.— Ed.

[48] generic
concepts— Ed.

[49] dramatic
psychology— Ed.

[50] The Anthropological Principle —Feuerbach’s thesis that, in
discussing philosophical questions, it is necessary to consider man as part of nature, as a biological
being.

The anthropological principle was directed against religion and idealism. However, by
considering man apart from the concrete historical and social relations, the anthropological principle
leads to idealism in the understanding of the laws of historical development.

N. G. Chernyshevsky ,
in struggling against idealism, also took the anthropological principle as his
starting-point and devoted a special work to this question under the title “The Anthropological
Principle in Philosophy” (see N.
G. Chernyshevsky, Selected Philosophical Essays, Moscow, 1953, pp. 49-135).

[51] The reference is to
L. Feuerbach’s Theogonie nach den Quellen des klassischen, hebräischen und christlichen Altertums. Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 9, 1857