The religion of mankind by L. Feuerbach

Paragraph I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX Recently (in 1904) the centenary of the birth of a remarkable thinker was celebrated, who, although he spent most of his adult life in rural hermitage, without betraying him even in the revolutionary year of 1848, nevertheless, with his philosophical ideas, had a deep influence on his contemporaries, which is far from being eradicated to this day. And, truly, among the names that express the spiritual image of the 19th century, on a par with the names of Hegel and Darwin, Marx and Og. Comte, Spencer and Mill, we should also mention the comparatively little-known name of the Bruckberg hermit - Ludwig Feuerbach. But if the ideas of Feuerbach are still alive, who can therefore rightly be ranked among the spiritual leaders of modern humanity, then his name is in undeserved neglect and oblivion. The centennial anniversary also brought nothing but a few, in most cases completely insignificant, newspaper articles. You can only point to one exception. Currently, through the works of Jodl and Bolin, two modern Feuerbachians, a new, expanded edition of Feuerbach’s works is being published, 1 and, in addition, a work on Feuerbach, written by the same Jodl, has been published in the series “Fromann’s Klassiker der Philosophie” (together with the monographs of Starke and Bolin, almost exhausting the meager literature about him). Being a resolute and principled opponent of Feuerbach's worldview in its very foundations, I would, however, especially wish to draw public attention to his ideas and to his writings, because thanks to the enormous merits of the latter, among which the philosophical radicalism and frank straightforwardness of Feuerbach should be placed in the first place, they pose with compelling energy the fundamental questions about the highest and last human values, so often relegated to the background. Feuerbach is one of those thinkers who to a high degree contribute to the conscious self-determination of a person in one direction or another; from him, as from a philosophical crossroads, roads sharply diverge in opposite directions, and it is useful for everyone, before finally entering the winding paths that go deeper into the wilds, to come to this crossroads, from where the initial difference in paths is visible. This is the general significance of L. Feuerbach's philosophy for our time. It is not difficult to understand why Feuerbach receives so little attention from representatives of modern philosophical thought, especially German school philosophy. This is explained most of all by the fact that he is too unlike them - the rough, daring, even revolutionary writer is too different from the respectable and decorous representatives of “scientific” critical philosophy, who are shocked by Feuerbach’s militant and passionate atheism, but do not want to see and appreciate in him truly human motives and real human suffering. The fashion for Nietzsche has already arrived, but it has not yet reached, and perhaps Feuerbach’s turn will not reach. The main and root cause of this cold indifference to Feuerbach (it also prevented Nietzsche from being seen for a long time) is that philosophy for Feuerbach is not a matter of school and a school specialty, as for many specialists in philosophy, but a matter of life. Feuerbach lived in his philosophy, hence its excitement, inconsistency and his constant, restless tendency to develop, remake and change his system. In this sense, there is something Nietzschean about who. Since philosophy really becomes a matter of life, then this is necessarily reflected in its themes, in its main problems. Problems of a scholastic, propaedeutic, technical nature recede into the background - we will not deny, often to the detriment of accuracy and clarity of thinking (Feuerbach, for example, has no horribile dictu - special treatises on the theory of knowledge; when he touches on these issues, he falls into helpless childish sensationalism, which can be rebutted by the average student of philosophy). But all his attention is absorbed by the vital tasks of philosophy, questions about absolute values ​​or the meaning of human life, that is, religious questions. Feuerbach’s religious interest remained dominant all his life, so the characteristic of one of Dostoevsky’s heroes is quite applicable to him: “God has tormented me all my life,” and, despite all of Feuerbach’s atheism, he should rightly be called an atheistic theologian. He himself speaks about himself in lectures on religion, given by him already in his late life during almost his only appearance before the public: “Despite the difference in the themes of my writings, they all have, strictly speaking, only one goal, one will and thought, one theme. Precisely, this topic is religion and theology and everything connected with them... In all my writings, I have never lost sight of the relationship to religion and theology and have always dealt with this main subject of my thought and life, although, of course, in different ways according to the difference in years.” 3 And a quick acquaintance with his works is enough to convince oneself of the validity of this characterization. He made his first appearance in literature with “Thoughts on Death and Immortality”; His main work, which represents one of the most remarkable and characteristic monuments of the thought of the 19th century, is “The Essence of Christianity,” to which he wrote a whole volume of additions and explanations. This was followed by “The Essence of Religion”, “Lectures on Religion”, “Theogony” and many small critical, polemical sketches, even poems (couplets). And this intensity of religious quest, the atheistic passion with which Feuerbach was obsessed, the constant efforts of fighting against God, unable to calm down and finally defeat the “tormenting” God - in a word, this absence of religious indifference, so common in our time, makes Feuerbach a very unique and significant phenomenon in the religious life of the 19th century. And all these features that alienate him from his current compatriots, in a strange way bring him closer to us, to our current quests. We are not disgusted by his lack of rigor in the school sense of the word, for it is not for us to lay claim to it, but on the other hand, this religious fervor, the concentrated isolation of his thought, his religious, albeit atheistic, enthusiasm are so dear and understandable to us. Stirner ironically called Feuerbach a “pious atheist” (frommer Atheist), and in fact Feuerbach was pious in his atheism, although at the same time there was some kind of irreconcilable stubbornness in him (which, in our opinion, constitutes the most characteristic feature of his face in the portrait), some kind of heavy one-mindedness that turned his heart away from God and made him an embodied contradiction - a “pious” fighter against God. But in sincere and difficult, painful fight against God, perhaps, there really lies a special (albeit, so to speak, preliminary) type of piety. Is it really possible that Feuerbach, Nietzsche, even Stirner (we now have Shestov), like kites, eating their own livers, so alien and far from the balanced and calmed, “sober” indifferentism of the positivists, really won’t find a place for themselves in one of the “many abodes” prepared by the Father, and won’t they finally put their torturing fingers of the unbelieving Thomas into nail ulcers? Will this sincere religious suffering really not be rewarded?! But if Feuerbach is so close to us with his right hand, which we consider the direction of his thought alien to religious indifference, then he receives no less vital significance thanks to his shuytse, which we consider all the positive content of his teaching, his atheistic dogma, and his religious-philosophical doctrine in general. This doctrine lives to this day, and primarily among the masses who profess the teachings of Marx and Engels, for in religious and philosophical terms, both of them are students of Feuerbach, and, moreover, unoriginal students, for their part only having dried up the doctrine of the teacher. Those familiar with the genesis of Marxism know how enormously influential Feuerbach's ideas were here. However, Engels himself talks about this in his brochure, which, although it does not have independent philosophical significance, is of great historical interest - “L. Feuerbach and the outcome of classical philosophy." Here we read the following: “...then Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christenthums appeared. With one blow it destroyed the contradiction, without further ado, placing materialism back on the throne. Nature exists independently of any philosophy; it is the foundation on which we grew up; We humans are ourselves a product of nature; Nothing exists outside of nature and man, and the higher beings that our religious philosophy has created are only fantastic reflections of our own being. The spell was broken, the “system” burst and was thrown aside, the contradiction was eliminated, although it existed only in the imagination. It was necessary to experience the liberating influence of this book in order to form an idea of ​​it. There was a general enthusiasm: we all instantly became Feuerbachians.” 4 Marx's early writings, dating back to the 1940s and now republished by Mehring, reflect this fascination with Feuerbach (Heilige Familie, Zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie, partly Zur Judenfrage, Engels's Die Lage Englands). Marx and Engels later retreated from orthodox Feuerbachianism, but Engels undoubtedly greatly exaggerates the extent of this disagreement. The materialist understanding of history and the doctrine of class struggle were only a completion and, so to speak, concretization of Feuerbach’s general formula, but did not in any way affect its essence. With regard to general philosophical ideas, Marx did not take the slightest step forward against Feuerbach, and the latter’s teaching was the soil on which Marxism grew, and to this day remains its actual general philosophical foundation. Feuerbach's atheistic humanism constitutes the soul of Marxist socialism 5 and is characteristic of it no less than the political-economic doctrine of Marx himself, which can be compatible with a fundamentally opposite general worldview. Bearing in mind this philosophical generation of ideas, we can safely put forward the paradoxical at first glance position that Feuerbach is to a much greater extent the spiritual father of Marxism than Marx himself, who gave only flesh for Feuerbach’s ideas, and therefore, if we deepen the current social democracy to its general philosophical foundations, then Feuerbach’s ideas will be at its foundation. This connection of ideas, however, is very weakly recognized or not even recognized at all by the participants in the modern Social Democratic movement due to its general philosophical impoverishment, which increases the further we move from the philosophical source. In any case, if one wants to criticize the essence of Marxism, then one must take into account not socialist ideas (which are not yet so characteristic of Marxism as such, for they can also be combined with an opposing theoretical worldview) and not even “economic materialism,” which is only a superstructure over the teachings of Feuerbach, but with the religious and philosophical ideas of this latter. Here is the religious-metaphysical center of Marxism, as well as all materialistic, atheistic socialism in general. For the purposes of religious and philosophical criticism, Marxism should be understood precisely as Feuerbachianism. But Feuerbach lives not only in Marxism, for Feuerbachianism is much broader than Marxism, the latter is only a special case of the first, and there may be several such special cases; undoubtedly, Marxism does not limit the sphere of direct or indirect influence of Feuerbach. It is reflected in the entire new anti-religious-humanitarian movement, in all atheistic humanism, in the atheistic religion of humanity, which characterizes modern times. 6 Here his influence collides and merges with the unambiguous influence of Comte, also a preacher of the religion of humanity. What is striking is the coincidence of basic ideas and the simultaneous presentation of two similar thinkers, alien by blood, by language, who hardly knew or heard of each other, but connected by the real unity of pan-European civilization and the spirit of the time. While the hermit of Bruckberg was nurturing his teachings on the religion of humanity in a Bavarian village, another hermit in Paris was creating his amazingly, mysteriously similar doctrine of “positive politics,” based on the same religion of humanity. Both thinkers share all the difference that exists between the cultures and the character of the countries that gave birth to them. One, a representative of the exact sciences, with contempt for speculative philosophy and with a very weak acquaintance with it, after scientific research, came to his final ideas, which he gave in the dogmatically clumsy form of some kind of papism without a pope. Another came from Hegel, from the depths of absolute German idealism, the son of reflection and abstraction, who contradicted himself in the confused course of his thoughts and retained to the end the indelible stamp of Hegelianism, a writer about whom Lange, restrained and accustomed to philosophical subtleties, expresses himself as follows: “Feuerbach’s system is distinguished by mystical darkness, which is in no way cleared up by emphasizing sensuality and evidence.” 7 And so different thinkers in different languages at the same time said the same thing: they raised and then resolved to the best of their ability the question of religion without a personal God, but with God - humanity, gave philosophical expression to the desire of modern humanity, in the words of Dostoevsky, to “settle without God,” moreover, completely and finally. Comte was luckier in our country than Feuerbach; he was more known and respected. But as a thinker, Feuerbach is much deeper, more significant and interesting than Comte, he better introduces the complex problem of man-theism, his argument is subtler and stronger, although due to greater complexity it also reveals a greater number of weaknesses. It was Feuerbach who gave the full and possibly complete expression of the idea of ​​man-theism, the religion of humanity. It is clear to the reader why Marxism is only a special case of Feuerbachianism or Kontism, because essentially the matter in the respect under consideration represents one and the same thing (although this does not prevent Marx from giving Comte, with his usual harshness, a good kick on occasion). Atheistic humanism, or the religion of humanity, finds many forms of expression in modern history besides Marxism. It is a universal, generalizing phenomenon in the spiritual life of modern times, since it is defined outside of Christianity or even in conscious opposition to it. The religion of humanity is the most significant religious creation of modern times. This product of his religious creativity, so contradictory and complex, requires an attentive, conscientious and impartial attitude towards itself, and the importance of its careful study cannot be exaggerated. Feuerbach left a large literary legacy in the form of works on philosophy, the history of philosophy and religious philosophy, so that familiarization with these works would require an entire monograph. 8 In addition, we must not forget that Feuerbach evolved throughout his life, starting with Hegelianism and ending with more or less decisive materialism. In view of this, quite a lot of problems can be raised regarding his philosophical development and teaching, relating to different aspects of his worldview in different eras. We do not set ourselves such a broad task. The fact is that in different aspects of his teaching, Feuerbach is of very different interest. We are of little interest, for example, in his theory of knowledge (if we can talk about it), which veers into sensualistic materialism, moreover, of a vulgar shade. We are also of little interest in his purely philosophical position, although it is very characteristic of the course of the general decomposition of Hegelianism and therefore interesting for the study of the fate of Hegelian philosophy. Finally, we can leave aside Feuerbach’s direct attacks on the Christian religion with his criticism of the dogmas of Christianity. This criticism is inextricably linked with Feuerbach’s own metaphysics and, despite its superficial and rational character, does not seem in itself so serious that it should be taken into account as such. It receives interest and significance only in connection with his own positive teaching about religion, with his philosophy of religion. 9 In this latter we see the center of gravity and the main interest of Feuerbach’s teaching. He himself saw the main work of his life in the new teaching about religion, which he considered a turning point in history. “The task of modern times,” he says, 10 “was the reification and humanization of God—the transformation and degeneration of theology into anthropology.” Feuerbach's anthropological teaching on religion, Feuerbach as a preacher of the religion of humanity, as a religious teacher of humanitarian atheism - this is the topic of this essay. In the main provisions of this doctrine, Feuerbach remained relatively motionless; he tried to improve and replenish it, but left its foundations intact, which were already fully defined in the work “Wesen des Christenthums.” Feuerbach developed and deepened the basic thoughts about the essence of religion, expressed in this work, in “Wesen der Religion”, “Vorlesungen über des Wesen der Religion”, in “Ergängzungen und Erläuterungen zum Wesen des Christenthums”, etc. He burdened the presentation of his thoughts with endless repetitions in different, sometimes even in slightly different words, with the persistence of a single-minded person, who, in addition, was somewhat wild in the village. But everywhere, throughout all his activities, one question runs through: what is the secret of religion? Why does man create God for himself? Characterizing his spiritual evolution, the starting point of which was the study of theology, the middle - metaphysics, and the final point - the philosophy of rationalism, positivism and atheism, Feuerbach says about himself: “God was my first thought, reason was the second, man was the third and last thought.” This often quoted expression of his characterizes the difference in the answers he gave at different times of his life to the same life question, namely the question of God as a subject of religion. God was Feuerbach's first, second, and last thought. The preacher of atheism, Feuerbach, not only does not deny religion in general, but sees in it a significant difference between man and animals, which do not have religion. 11 He puts this in connection with the nature of human consciousness, which is characterized by the idea of ​​the infinite, the main feature of religion. “Consciousness, in the strict or proper sense of the word, and the consciousness of the infinite are inseparable; limited consciousness is not consciousness.” 12 Feuerbach seeks not to abolish religion, but to humanize it, to bring it down from heaven to earth, to dissolve it in the elemental power of feeling, 13 and, most importantly, to present it as a split between man and himself, which, once realized, is subject to abolition and conscious replacement by the religion of humanity. "The absolute being, man's god, is his own being." 14 In the preface to his collected works, Feuerbach formulates his main idea about religion in the following terms: “The question of whether God exists or not, the opposition between atheism and theism belongs to the 18th and 17th centuries, but not to the 19th century. I deny God, this means for me: I deny the negation of man. I put in place of the illusory, fantastic, heavenly affirmation (Position) of man, which in real life necessarily leads to the negation of man, the sensual, real, and therefore necessarily also the political and social affirmation of man. The question about the existence and non-existence of God is precisely the question about the existence or non-existence of man.” “What God is for man is his spirit, his soul, and what constitutes his spirit, his soul, his heart, this is his God: God is the open interior, the expressed self (Selbst) of man; religion is the solemn revelation of man’s hidden treasures, the confession of his innermost thoughts, the open confession of the sacrament of love.” 15 “Religion, at least Christian religion, is a person’s attitude towards himself or, more precisely, towards his being, but an attitude towards his being as to another being. The divine being is nothing other than a human being or, better, a human being, freed from the boundaries of the individual, i.e., the actual, corporeal man, objectified (vergegenständlicht), that is, considered and revered as another, different, special being - all definitions of the divine being are therefore definitions of a human being.” 16 “Religion is the separation of man from himself; he opposes God to himself as a being opposite to himself. God is not what man is, man is not what God is. God is infinite, man is a finite being; God is perfect, man is imperfect; God is eternal, man is temporary; God is omnipotent, man is powerless; God is holy, man is sinful. God and man are opposites (Extreme): God is an exclusively positive principle, the totality of all realities, man is exclusively negative, the totality of all insignificances (Nichtigkeiten). But man objectifies his own being in religion. Thus, it must be proven that this opposition, this split between God and man, with which religion begins, is a split between man and his own being.” 17 “You believe in love as a divine property, for you yourself love, you believe that God is a wise, good being, for you know nothing higher than goodness and reason, and you believe that God exists, that he is, therefore, a subject or being, for you yourself exist, you yourself are a being... God is for you something existing (ein Existerendes), a being on the same basis on which he appears to you wise, blessed, good." 18 On this basis, “to deny man means to deny religion” 19 and “where man ceases, religion ceases.” 20 Thus, “faith in God is nothing other than faith in human dignity, in the divine significance of the human person,” 21 man is the beginning of religion, man is the middle of religion, man is the end of religion.” 22 “Our attitude towards religion,” Feuerbach sums up his conclusion, “is therefore not only negative, but critical; we distinguish the true from the false. Religion is the first self-consciousness of man. Religions are sacred precisely because they are the traditions of the first consciousness. But what is first for religion, God, is in reality second, for he is only the objectified being of man, and what is second for it, man, must be posited and expressed as the first. Love for humanity should not be derivative, it should become original (ursprünglich). Only then does love become a true, sacred and reliable force. If the being of man is the highest being for man, then practically the love of man for man must be the first and highest law. Homo homini deus est - this is the highest practical rule - this is a turning point in world history. The relations of children and parents, spouses, brothers, friends, in general person to person, in short, moral relations in themselves are truly religious relations. Life in general, in its essential aspects, is of a completely divine nature.” 23 So, homo homini deus est is a lapidary formula that expresses the essence of Feuerbach’s religious views. This is not a denial of religion or even atheism, it is, in contrast to theism, 24 anthropo-theism, and anthropology, by the force of things, turns out to be in the role of theology. Feuerbach subsequently added a second floor to this initial teaching. Namely, in later works (in “Wesen der Religion” and “Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion”) the essence of religion is still seen in the feeling of dependence (Abhängigkeitsgefühl - Schleiermacher’s famous formula) on nature and to the original formula: Theologie ist Anthropologie, another addition is made - und Physiologie. Approaching more and more to naturalism and vulgar materialism and fearing that his first formula also sounds too idealistic, Feuerbach hastens to protect it from such an interpretation with a corresponding materialist interpretation. “The essence that man presupposes, with which he is connected by a necessary relationship, without which neither his existence nor his being can be conceived, is nothing other than nature.” 25 “The divine essence, revealed in nature, is something other than nature itself, which is revealed, represented and imprinted on man as a divine being... Nature is not only the first, original object, it is also the abiding foundation, the constantly existing, although hidden basis (Hintergrund) of religion.” 26 “My doctrine is expressed in two words: nature and man. The essence of man that I assume, the essence that is the basis or cause of man, to which he is grateful for his emergence and existence, this is and I call it not god - a mystical, incomprehensible, polysemantic word, but nature - a clear, sensual, unambiguous word and essence" (!!!). Feuerbach diligently signs his main drawing: “Here is a lion, not a dog,” - this must be understood materialistically and sensually, but not idealistically and abstractly. A former follower of Hegel, who, one must think, passed through Kant, and in general a philosophically educated person, brushes aside the phantom of religion that haunts him, fences himself off from God with a vulgar-mythological concept of nature, which he accepts without any criticism, without any analysis. 27 If this side of the teaching is of a kind of historical and psychological interest, which is why we could not pass over this later theoretical addition in silence, if only for the sake of the fact that the author himself attached such fundamental importance to it, then these later self-interpretations do not have any philosophical interest or independent significance, and we will not dwell on them further, but will turn to a more careful study of the main religious and philosophical idea of Feuerbach, his anthropotheism. Here, first of all, the basic question arises: if a person in reality is or should become the true object of religion, then what kind of person: this one or everyone he meets, me or another, an individual or a species, otherwise, a person or humanity? Anthropotheism, or, according to the Russian expression of Dostoevsky, human deity, can have as its object either individual chosen ones or the entire human race, be aristocratic, oligarchic and even egoistic (“egotism”) or democratic, spreading in idea to the entire human race. It is precisely this democratic deification of the human race as a whole that characterizes Feuerbach’s worldview. Homo homini deus est should be translated as follows: the human race is God for the individual, the species is God for the individual. “The concept of deity (we read from Feuerbach) coincides with the concept of humanity. All divine definitions, all definitions that make God a god, are definitions of the genus, which, although limited in the individual, these boundaries are eliminated in the essence of the genus and even in its existence, since it has a corresponding existence in the totality of all people. My knowledge, my will are limited; but boundaries for me are not at the same time boundaries for others, not to mention humanity; What is hard for me is easy for someone else; What is impossible and incomprehensible for one time is understandable and possible for the future. My life is connected with a certain time, but the life of humanity is not (?!). The history of mankind consists of nothing more than the progressive overcoming of boundaries, which at any given time are considered the boundaries of humanity and therefore absolute, insurmountable. The future reveals more and more that the supposed boundaries of the genus were only the boundaries of individuals... Thus, the genus is unlimited, only the individual is limited. But the feeling of limitation is painful, from this burden the individual is liberated in the contemplation of a higher being; in him he possesses what he lacks. God for Christians is nothing more than the contemplation (Anschaung) of the immediate unity of the genus and the individual, the General and the individual being, God is the concept of the genus as an individual, the concept or essence of the genus, which is the genus as a universal being as the totality of all perfections, all properties, freed from the real or imaginary boundaries of the individual, but at the same time an individual, special being. “Essence and existence are identical for God” - this means nothing more than that he is a generic concept, a generic being, directly existing and as a separate being.” 28 “The idea of ​​the genus (Feuerbach develops in polemics with Stirner) is necessary, integral to the individual, and everyone is separate. “We are perfect enough,” the One (Stirner) justly and elegantly expresses; but at the same time we feel limited and imperfect, for we necessarily compare ourselves not only with others, but also with ourselves. We feel limited not only morally, but also sensually, in space and time; We, given individuals, exist only in this specific place, in this limited time. How can we heal from the feeling of this limitation, if not in the thought of an unlimited kind, that is, in the thought of other people, other places, other happy times? Whoever, therefore, does not put the genus in the place of the deity leaves a gap in the individual, which must be filled by the idea of ​​God, that is, the personified being of the genus. Only the race is able to abolish deity and religion, and at the same time replace them (Feuerbach lets slip here about the true, God-fighting motive that brought his religion of humanity to life). Not to have any religion means to think only about oneself, to have religion means to think about others. And this religion is the only one that lasts, for as soon as we have at least two people - a husband and a wife, we already have a religion. Two, discrimination, is the origin of religion - you are God for me, for I do not exist without you, I depend on you, there is no you, there is no me.” 29 In the Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft we find the following decisive aphorisms about the divinity of the race: “The individual man in himself does not have the essence of man in himself, either as a moral or as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in communication, in the unity of man with man, a unity based only on the reality of the difference between I and you” (No. 59). “Loneliness is finitude and limitation, community is freedom and infinity. Man in himself (für sich) is only man (in the usual sense of the word): man with man, the unity of I and you, is God” (No. 60). Thus, there is no doubt that we are talking here about nothing else but the religious adoration of humanity, whether in the person of the first person you meet or the entire human race. Feuerbach constantly oscillates (and this oscillation, as we will see below, follows from the very essence of the matter and is an inevitable property of the philosophical position he takes) between the narrow and broad understanding of humanity as God. In his polemic with Stirner, he even points to the difference between the sexes and the family union as a necessary basis for the religious attitude towards man, so that the church of this deity either narrows to the marital bedroom and the nursery, then expands, covering the arena of life of all historical humanity. In Feuerbach’s worldview, particularistic and universalistic tendencies are fighting, and if, bearing in mind the first, Lange designated it by the name of thuism (from tu-you), then, bearing in mind the second, it should be called humanism in the broadest sense of the word. And when Feuerbach was not so pressed against the wall by crushing criticism, as was the case with Stirner, he was inclined to consider the subject of his religion universalistically, even revealing a clear desire to personify the race, to give the idea of ​​​​humanity not only an abstract, but also a real existence, to feel the Grand-être that Og taught. Cont. His judgments about Christ are unusually characteristic in this regard, showing how, despite his knowledge and against his will, some truths of Christianity were nevertheless dear and close to those who made the fight against Christianity his life task. We read: “Christ is nothing other than the image in which the unity of the race was imprinted and expressed for the people’s consciousness. Christ loved people; He wanted to unite them all without distinction of gender, age, rank or nationality. Christ is the love of humanity for itself (!!) as an image (in accordance with the developed nature of religion) or as a face, but a face that (in a religious sense) has the meaning of only a symbol is an ideal face. Therefore, love is presented as a distinctive sign of His disciples. But love, as it has been said, is nothing more than the practical realization of the unity of the race in the mood (Gesinnung). The race is not thought alone; it exists in feeling, in mood, in the energy of love. Rod is what instills love in me. A heart full of love is the heart of the race. Thus, Christ, as the consciousness of love, is the consciousness of the race. We must all become one in Christ. Christ is the consciousness of our unity. So, whoever loves a person for the sake of a person, who rises to the love of the race, to the universal, corresponding to the essence of the kind of love, he is a Christian, he himself is Christ. He does what Christ did, what made Christ Christ. Where, therefore, the consciousness of the genus as a genus arises, there Christ disappears, although His true essence is preserved, for He was only a substitute, an image of the consciousness of the genus.” 30 Despite all the religious misery of these judgments, in which the living Face of Christ, imprinted in the hearts of those who believe in Him, is completely eliminated, they quite clearly express the idea of ​​​​the real, and not just abstract, unity of the human race. Refusing to see this real, mystical unity in the God-man, but instinctively feeling all the importance, all the necessity of this unity, Feuerbach is forced to look for it in Leviathan, and humanity, instead of the body of Christ, is declared the body of Leviathan. Inexorable logic punishes the idolatrous atheism of Feuerbach, step by step pushing him, a lover of freedom and a communist, through the Hegelian deification of the state to the Roman deification of the head of state. Having rejected Christ, he makes the head of state, Divus Caesar, the real head of humanity! Those who consider this to be slander are invited to carefully observe the following statements of Feuerbach: “The subjective origin of the state is explained by the belief in man as a god for man. In the state, the forces of man are isolated and developed in order to establish an infinite being with the help of this division and their new combination; many people, many forces are one force. The state is the totality of all realities, the state is providence for man. In a state, one replaces the other, one complements the other; What I can’t do, I don’t know, someone else can. I am not alone, given over to the accidents of natural force; others exist for me, I am surrounded (umfangen) by the universal being, I am a member of the whole. The true state is the unlimited, infinite, true, perfect, divine man. Only the state is a man who determines himself, relates to himself, an absolute man... The connection of the state is practical atheism; people exist in the state because they exist in the state without God, the state is God for man, which is why it rightfully vindicates for itself the divine predicate of “Majesty” (“Majestät”).” 31 A kind of cult! But let's listen again: “Man is the fundamental being (Grundwesen) of the state. The state is the realized, organized, revealed totality (Totalität) of the human being. In the state, essential qualities or types of human activity are embodied in various classes, but in the person of the head of state they are again reduced to identity (Identität). The head of state represents all classes without distinction: before him they are all equally necessary and equal. The head of state is the representative of the universal man.” 32 This is the content that the formula homo homini deus est ultimately receives: God for man is the head of the state, and all that remains is to resurrect the outer shell of this ancient idea, that is, to restore the sacred images of the head of state, the offering of sacrifices to him, etc. Doesn’t the shadow of something that will one day sit in the church like a god and demand divine honors flash here like a fatal premonition!.. One way or another, this is the religion preached by Feuerbach. For we are talking specifically about a religion that would be capable of opposing the Christian religion, about a deliberately anti-Christian religion. For Feuerbach, one philosophical doctrine is not enough, as various theories have been until now. “Until now (die bisherige) philosophy could not replace religion; it was a philosophy, but not a religion, without religion. She left the peculiar essence of religion outside herself; she claimed (vindicierte) for herself only the form of thinking (Gedankenform). If philosophy is called upon to replace religion, then it must become religion as philosophy, it must take into itself in a manner characteristic of it (ihr conform) what constitutes the essence of religion, the advantages that the latter has over philosophy... If practically man has now taken the place of the Christian, then theoretically the human essence should take the place of the divine. In a word, we must express what we want to become in one highest principle, in one highest word: only in this way do we sanctify our life, justify our tendency. Only in this way can we free ourselves from the contradiction that currently poisons our inner being: from the contradiction between our life and thinking and religion, which fundamentally contradicts them. For we must become religious again - politics must become our religion, but this is only possible if we have as the highest in our worldview that which turns politics into religion for us. You can make politics a religion instinctively; here we are dealing with a higher conscious (leitztem ausgesprochenen) foundation, an official principle. This principle is nothing more than, to put it negatively, atheism, i.e., the elimination of a god different from man.” 33 Words that are remarkably characteristic of Feuerbach, parting the foggy philosophical curtain and showing both the main engine of his thought and his proud dream: this engine is atheism, more specifically, anti-Christianity, the dream of starting a new era, creating a new religion, turning people from “theologians into anthropologists, from theophiles into philanthropists, from candidates for the next world into students of this world, from religious and political valets of the heavenly and earthly monarchy and the aristocracy into conscious, free citizens of the earth." 34 There is no god but man, and Feuerbach is his prophet. This is not a small matter, for if Feuerbach’s own opinion is true that periods of history differ from each other by religious upheavals, then Feuerbach wanted to open a new era in history and in the wilderness of his Bruckberg forge a spiritual lever with which humanity could be turned over and put on a new path. It is remarkable how much Feuerbach managed to please the spirit of the times in the words quoted. It was impossible to say anything more in keeping with the modern mood, more pleasing to the wickedness of the prince of this world, than this call to have religion in politics, to make politics a religion. For throughout the entire 19th century to the present day - and the further, the faster - the number of people who do without otherworldly ideals and completely transfer them here, into the “kingdom of this world” has been growing, and in fact, for these people, politics has long become a religion. Numerous regiments of materialist socialism, constantly multiplying in different countries, live by this religion. Here, by the way, the validity of our introductory remarks is confirmed about the extent to which Feuerbach expresses with his teaching the soul of modern materialist socialism, its religion, the extent to which he penetrates into its most secret and intimate core. Once the genus is declared to be an absolute and a deity, from here comes the inevitable and necessary conclusion, namely, that “das Mass der Gattung ist das absolute Mass, Gesetz und Kriterium der Menschheit,” 35 i.e., that “the measure of the genus is the absolute measure, the law and criterion of humanity.” In the generation are all the law and all the prophets. Although the dogma of the religion of the genus is only briefly and incompletely outlined by Feuerbach, we will indicate some of its main dogmas in view of their characteristic nature for the entire plan and the possible direction of further development. Believers see in God the living embodiment of truth, which is revealed in the historical knowledge of mankind, in the development of scientific and philosophical thought, gradually approaching human consciousness. They see in him, further, the embodiment of absolute moral perfection, a living ideal, about which it is said: “Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” They see in it, finally, the source of perfect beauty, poured into the world and having in its triumph “save the world.” The Divinity is conceived as a trinity of truth, goodness and beauty. Feuerbach's religion of the genus does not abolish this trinity, but it relates it to its deity, makes these definitions predicates of the genus, playing the role of the absolute. (It should be noted, however, that Feuerbach himself did not deal with issues of aesthetics, but it is not difficult to imagine in what direction it could have been developed in general accordance with his basic ideas.) Truth, according to Feuerbach, is a function of the genus and is established by the genus consciousness. “Only in communication, only from relationships between people, ideas arise. Not alone, but only together they come to concepts, to knowledge in general. Two people are necessary for the birth of a spiritual man as well as a physical one: communication between man and man is the first principle and criterion of truth and universality. Confidence even in the existence of other things besides me is for me mediated by confidence in the existence of another person besides me. What I see alone, I doubt; Only what the other person sees is true.” 36 “Truth does not exist in thinking, not in knowing at one’s own expense (für sich selbst). Truth is only the totality of human life and being.” 37 “What is true is that in which another agrees with me - unanimity (Übereinstimmung) is the first sign of truth, but only because the genus is the final scale (Mass) of truth... What is true is what is consistent with the essence of the genus, what is false is what contradicts it. There is no other law of truth." 38 This is the main epistemological thesis of Feuerbach, which at the present time, complicated by Kantianism and Darwinism, expresses the basic epistemological idea of ​​Simmel (partly Riehl). Feuerbach himself, however, recoils from the conclusions arising from the straightforward and decisive application of this thesis, according to which it turns out that it is not Socrates who is right, but his judges, not Copernicus, but the tribunal that tried him, not at all an innovator and revolutionary of thought, but an inert and dark crowd. “The other,” continues Feuerbach, “in relation to me is a representative of the race, a substitute for others in the plural; it is his judgment that can be of greater importance to me than the judgment of a countless crowd.” 39 Thus, Feuerbach escapes from his own demagogic epistemology, and since in another place 40 Feuerbach notes that the individual represents the race for himself, then Feuerbach’s thesis loses all real meaning and, having freed himself from all the unpleasant conclusions from his teaching, he goes from defense to the offensive: “In a word, there is a qualitative, critical difference between people, but Christianity extinguishes these qualitative differences.” Whether Christianity is to blame or not for this extinguishing, but with such an interpretation, the religion of the race, of humanity, insensitively passes into the religion of the individual-superman, and Feuerbach is transformed into Nietzsche, generally speaking, who is the antipode of Feuerbach precisely at this point. There is not only truth in the genus, but also goodness. “The other is my objective conscience: he reproaches me for my shortcomings, even if he does not directly tell me about it: he is my personified sense of shame. The consciousness of the moral law, right, expediency, even truth, is confined to the consciousness of others.” 41 However, for a species, as an absolute, it is not enough to be an “objective conscience,” that is, a subjective agent of good; this position in itself is not very characteristic of the religion of mankind; it must also be objective good, the embodiment of existing good. The Absolute is an absolute; therefore, holiness also belongs to it as an integral attribute. The sum consists of all the components, and the genus consists of all individuals, which means that I, too, participate in collective holiness with all the indelible stains that my conscience knows, and Messalina, and Caligula, and Borgias, and Chekhov’s “boring”, gray people... Here is your god, fall on your face and pray, pray to yourself, pray to Messalina, pray to “Ionych.” This is a fatal question for Feuerbach and for every religion of mankind: where to put all the weakness and all the depravity of the new god, which in the Christian religion is brought into connection with the fundamental human fall, with original sin and, further, with the dogma of atonement? Now I ask your attention - we will see how Feuerbach gets out of his difficulty. This reasoning seems to me to be the most important, the most decisive and the most responsible in all the works, in the entire worldview of Feuerbach and, moreover, completely irreducible from it: whoever accepts it will easily accept the rest of the dogmatics of the religion of mankind, and whoever does not accept only this, does not accept anything. Feuerbach is talking specifically about the dogma of original sin, and, criticizing this dogma, he says the following: “Here there is absolutely no objective view, the consciousness that you belong to the perfection of the self, that people only collectively make up a person, only together they are what a person should be, they exist as he should exist. All people are sinners, I admit this, but not all of them are sinners in the same way; on the contrary, there is a very large, even significant difference. One person is inclined to lie, and the other is not: he would rather sacrifice his life than break his word or lie; the third has a tendency to drunkenness, the fourth to debauchery, but the first does not have all these tendencies, either by the grace of his nature, or due to the energy of his character. Morally men complete each other, both mentally and physically, so that taken together as a whole they are what they should be, representing the perfect man.” Thus, to obtain a perfect person, Feuerbach suggests taking the algebraic sum of virtues and vices. He just doesn’t notice that according to this recipe, which teaches how from ten Messalina one can get one Caecilia, from ten Caligulas one Marquis Posa, from ten Chekhov types one hero, etc., etc., in the final sum, at best, only zero is obtained, as a result of extinguishing pluses and minuses, and not a “perfect man.” Feuerbach develops his thought as follows: “If even love and friendship from beings that are in themselves imperfect make one, relatively at least perfect whole, how much more do the sins and vices of individual people disappear in the species itself, which has a dignified existence only in all humanity (in der Gesammtheit der Menschheit) ... Lamentations about sin therefore only come into the order of the day when the human individual in his individuality is considered completely absolute, not needing others for his realization in a kind, a perfect person, when the place of the consciousness of the race is replaced by the exclusive self-consciousness of the individual, when the individual does not recognize himself as a part of humanity, does not distinguish himself from humanity, and therefore turns his own sins, his own boundaries, his weakness into universal sins, into the sins, boundaries and weakness of all humanity. Therefore, where a genus is not an object for a person as a genus, there it becomes an object for him as a god. The lack of a concept of the genus is compensated by the concept of God as a being, free from boundaries and shortcomings that burden the individual and, in his opinion, the genus itself, since he identifies himself with the genus. But this unlimited essence, free from the boundaries of individuals, is precisely nothing other than a genus, which reveals the infinity of its essence in what is realized in unlimitedly numerous and diverse individuals. If all people were absolutely equal, then, of course, there would be no difference between the race and the individual. But in this case, the existence of many people would be pure luxury, one would be enough for the purposes of the race... However, although the essence of man is one, it is infinite, his actual existence aims to reveal an infinite, mutually complementary diversity, the richness of his essence. Unity in essence is diversity in existence." 42 This is how Feuerbach deals with the fatal questions of individual consciousness, the tragedy of the spirit, ulcers of conscience, the absoluteness of demands and the powerlessness to satisfy them, with all these antinomies that make a person such a mysterious contradiction, from which metaphysical systems and religious beliefs are born. And there is one answer to everything: the imperfections of the individual are absorbed into the genus, the sum is greater than its parts. The genus is credited with perfection, infinity, a variety of forms of existence and, naturally, the ability for limitless progress in history, which in modern philosophical consciousness is something like a “commission” among bureaucrats: in order to deal with the restless questions of life that persistently require resolution and at the same time insoluble by bureaucratic means, they are handed over to the commission, and in order to deal with the “damned” philosophical questions, they refer to progress: it will resolve everything, arrange everything. We also read from Feuerbach the following in connection with the question of the future life: “The conclusion regarding the theological or religious Jenseits, the assumption of a future life for the purpose of improving man would in this case be justified if humanity were constantly at one point, if there were no history, improvement, improvement of the human race on earth... But there is a cultural history of mankind. Countless things that our ancestors could not and did not know, we can and do know now... Thus, what for us is now only an object of desire will one day come true, countless things that were impossible for the dark guardians and defenders of the present ideas of faith and religious institutions, modern political and social conditions, will one day become reality: countless things that we do not know now, but wanted to know, will be known by our descendants. In place of deities, in which only the baseless whimsical desires of man are fulfilled, we have the human race or nature, in place of religion - education, in place of Jenseits behind our grave - on earth the historical future, the future of humanity." 43 At the same time, Feuerbach is not embarrassed by the question of the death of all living things, everything individual, which fits so poorly into this optimistic picture. We must give Feuerbach justice; he did not remain silent and did not simply brush aside this problem, as is usually customary to do. On the contrary, he always peered intently into the mystery of death, without closing his eyes and trying to come to terms with death and justify it, to create, as Jodl put it, “thanatodicy” (by analogy with theodicy), which is so difficult and so contrary to living and immediate feeling. Several times he returned to the problem of death. His first work, Todesgedanken, was dedicated to her, still imbued with pantheistic Hegelianism, where, next to the death of the individual, the immortality of the whole is recognized (this is one of Feuerbach’s most vague and immature works). “Todesgedanken” therefore represents an optimistically complacent hymn to the death of the individual in the name of the immortality of the whole. 44 Later, Feuerbach focuses his criticism on existing ideas about life after death, 45 but this rational criticism is of little fundamental interest. In the end, having become a philosophical materialist, Feuerbach settles on the idea of ​​biological adaptation to death, the naturalness of timely death, anticipating what Mechnikov is currently preaching. In “Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion,” which sums up his entire worldview, we read the following judgment on this matter: “Everything has its measure,” says the Greek philosopher, “eventually saturation comes for everything, even for life, and man finally wishes for himself death. Normal death, in accordance with nature, the death of a complete person who has outlived his life, therefore has nothing frightening. Old people often even sigh about death. The German philosopher Kant, out of impatience, could hardly wait for death; he strove for it, not in order to start living again, but out of a desire for his end. Only an unnatural, unfortunate death, the death of a child, a youth, a husband, in full force, outrages us against death and makes us desire a new life. But no matter how strange, no matter how sorrowful such accidents are for those who experience them, they, however, do not authorize us to accept Jenseits for the very reason that these abnormal cases - they are abnormal, even if they are now repeated more often than natural death in accordance with nature - have the consequence of an abnormal other world, a world only for those who died violently or prematurely; but such an abnormal world would be something incredible and counterintuitive.” 46 These judgments completely characterize Feuerbach's general worldview. We can now turn to a critical examination of Feuerbach's worldview. But first we must dwell on one literary episode that is extremely interesting for illuminating Feuerbach’s doctrine and therefore has great importance for its accurate understanding. We are referring to Feuerbach's polemic with Stirner, the famous author of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. Between the two contemporaries, Stirner and Feuerbach, there is both great closeness and irreconcilable opposition. The similarity lies in the fact that both of them are militant preachers of atheism, but the opposite lies in the difference in the ways of understanding this atheism and the content that is invested in it. Feuerbach preaches a positive, humanistic atheism, which denies God in the name of man and humanity, and formulates his atheistic religion: homo homini deus est, while Stirner understood his atheism in a boldly nihilistic way, sharpening it into preaching pure nihilism, the denial of all higher values, everything holy: “Alles Heilige ist ein Band, eine Fessel.” 47 He approached the very edge of the abyss, behind which a yawning abyss opens, he atomized humanity, abolishing all collectivism of its existence and leaving only one “single” self, for which there is no right, no general norm, no good (Ich bin meine Gattung, bin ohne Norm, ohne Gesetz, ohne Muster u. dgl.), for all these concepts arose and are associated with the idea of recognition of human society, “kind”, equivalence someone else's self to mine. Stirner says in the preface to his book: “The divine is the work of God, the human is the work of “man.” My cause is neither divine nor human, it is not true, good, just, free, etc., but exclusively my own (das Meinige), and it is not at all universal, but is unique (Einzige), just as I am unique. There is nothing higher than me! (Mir geht nichts über Mich).” 48 Here are two lapidary formulas expressing two atheisms, Stirner’s and Feuerbach’s: “Mir geht nichts über Mich” and “homo homini deus est.” Could there be a greater contrast, further emphasized by the proximity of the original positions? The clash between these two atheists is of enormous philosophical interest, which has so far been somehow unnoticed and unappreciated in literature. Which one is right as an atheist? Which of them is the more genuine atheist, whose atheism is more consistent, more radical, more sincere, more courageous? Note that for people who have made atheism as a specialty, who care about nothing more than being consistent atheists, there can be no greater insult, no worse irony, than accusing them of theology, piety, and religiosity. And this is exactly the accusation that one, bolder atheist brought against another, who, according to a crude but apt saying, would like to maintain innocence and acquire capital, would like, with atheistic dogma, not to renounce some conclusions from religious beliefs. Stirner was the first to throw down the gauntlet in his book, which can be said to be one continuous objection to Feuerbach, openly mocking his piety: “After the destruction of faith, Feuerbach dreams of taking refuge in the supposedly peaceful bay of love. “The highest and first law must be the love of man for man. Homo homini deus est – this is the highest practical rule, this is the turning point of history.” Actually, only God, deus, has changed, but love has remained; there love became a superhuman god, here love for a human god, and homo as deus. Therefore, man is holy to Me. And everything “truly human” is sacred to Me! Marriage itself is sacred. And the same is true with all moral relations. Holy is and may your friendship be, holy is property, holy is marriage, holy is the good of every person, but holy is an und für sich. Isn't there a priest here again? Who is his god? Human! What is considered divine? Human! Thus, only the predicate is turned into a subject and instead of the statement: “God is love” there is: “love is divine”, instead of “God became man” there is “man became god”, etc. This is only a new religion. 49 Revolting against the thoughts and concepts of modernity, the egoist ruthlessly commits the most decisive destruction of shrines (Entheiligung). Nothing is sacred to him! It would be foolish to claim that I have no power over my own. Only the position that I take in relation to it will be completely different from the one that existed in the religious age: I will be an enemy of any higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and humiliate ourselves before it. The destroyer of shrines (Entheiliger) strains all his strength against the fear of God. Whether God or man has sanctifying power in man, therefore, whether something is revered as holy in the name of God or man, this does not change the fear of God, for man is just as likely to be revered as a “supreme being,” just as from a specifically religious point of view, God as a “supreme being” requires fear and reverence from us, and both of them appeal to us. Our own fear of God has long been shaken, and more or less conscious atheism, outwardly recognizable by its widespread “unchurchliness,” involuntarily sets the tone. But what was taken from God was given to man, and the strength of humanity (Macht der Humanität) increased to the same extent that piety lost weight: “man” is the current god, and the fear of man took the place of the old fear of God. But since man is only a variety of a higher being, then in reality only a metamorphosis has occurred in the higher being, and human fear is only a modified form of the fear of God. Our atheists are pious people." 50 “Whether there is one or a triune God, or a Lutheran God, or an être suprême, or no God at all, since “man” represents a supreme being, it makes no difference to the one who denies the supreme being itself, for in his eyes these servants of the supreme being are collectively pious people: the most ferocious (wüthendste) atheist is no less than a believing Christian.” 51 The impression made on Feuerbach by Stirner's criticism was enormous. Before our eyes, Feuerbach simply writhes in pain under the heavy blows of Stirner’s sarcasms. Although he states in a letter to his brother 52 that Stirner in his “brilliant” book “misses the point regarding me” and that his criticism is “based either on simple thoughtlessness (puren Unverstand) or frivolity,” but in his response to Stirner (“Das Wesen des Christenthums in Beziehund auf den “Einzige und sein Eigenthum”) he reveals, in our opinion, not only an amazing weakness, but also complete confusion. His theory did not withstand the action of the alkaline acid reagent that the reckless “egoist” appeared to her. Feuerbach first tries to go on the offensive himself: ““Ich hab mein Sach auf Nichts gestellt,” sings the One. But isn’t nothing also a predicate of God, and isn’t the proposition: God is nothing (which, we note by the way, was never expressed and would not have been expressed by Stirner, who put forward a completely different thesis: not “God is nothing,” but “there is no God, there is no shrine”), is not an expression of religious consciousness?” In a note to this place for scientific visibility, Feuerbach cites a link that the definition “God is nothing” is found not only in Eastern religions, but also among Christian mystics. With this reference, Feuerbach only finally reveals his confusion and powerlessness to object to anything on the merits: needless to say, there is much less similarity between the mystical acosmism of Buddhism and some Christian mystics and the militant nihilism of Feuerbach than even between the teachings of Feuerbach and church orthodoxy. Next, Feuerbach tries to challenge the thesis of the “single” about its “uniqueness” by referring to the existence of sex, wife, children, etc. etc., as if this reference has any significance for the “one” and is capable of inducing him to renounce his “uniqueness”, step down from his nihilistic throne and recognize the rights of these people, and the responsibilities of himself, recognize in them a shrine for himself, and not a means. As if the existence of harems and lupanars does not sufficiently demonstrate that the difference between the sexes in itself is not at all sufficient for a woman to become not a thing that satisfies the whims of her “only” master, but a person about whom one can say homo homini deus est. In his further remarks, Feuerbach is helplessly confused in contradictions, 53 but does not object to Stirner in essence. We think that the reason for this, of course, is not Feuerbach’s accidental weakness, but the very essence of the matter: he really had nothing to object to, for Stirner is absolutely right about Feuerbach. In Feuerbach's language, Stirner is the truth, Feuerbach's secret revealed. The real atheist is Stirner, and Feuerbach remains, indeed, a “pious” atheist, a “priest.” “The moralists,” Stirner reproaches Feuerbach, “have taken the fat off religion by using it themselves, and now they are trying to get rid of the glandular disease that results from it” (Drüsenkrankheit). “With the force of despair, Feuerbach grabs at the entire content of Christianity, not in order to throw it away, no, in order to attract it to himself, so that it, long desired, but always distant, with a last effort, can be drawn into his heaven and kept with him forever. Isn’t this a struggle of final despair, not a struggle for life and death, and isn’t this, at the same time, both Christian longing (Sehnsucht) and desire for Jenseits? The hero does not want to join the Jenseits, but wants to attract him to himself, force him to become Diesseits! Hasn’t the whole world since then shouted, more or less consciously, that we are talking about this light (Diesseits) and that heaven must come to earth and be experienced already here? 54 In the face of an all-destructive nihilist who stops at nothing, Feuerbach appears to be a real good boy, a pastor, a good-natured sectarian. The whole contrast between two atheists and two “egoists” flaunting their atheism and their egoism will be expressed even more fully, perhaps, if we get to know how they understand their egoism. Let's listen to "The One" first. In response to possible accusations of selfishness, he states: "OK! I don’t want to have anything special in comparison with others, I don’t want to claim any advantage over them, but I don’t measure myself by others and don’t want to have any right at all. I want to be everything and have everything I can. Whether others have the same thing is of no concern to me. They can neither have nor represent the same, the same... I consider myself not something special, but the only one (einzig). Of course, I have similarities with others, but this only matters for comparison or reflection; in reality I am incomparable and unique. I don’t want to recognize or respect anything in you, neither an owner, nor a tramp (Lump), nor even just a person, but I want to use (verbrauchen) you... For me, you are only what you constitute for me, namely my object, and since my object, then my property.” 55 “Ausser mir giebt es kein Recht.” 56 How all this was guessed by Dostoevsky, who, of course, never knew Stirner, but penetrated deeply into the worldview of atheism. After all, the above German phrase in Russian can be directly translated by the fatal formula of Yves. Karamazova: everything is allowed, there is no God, there is no morality. “Wherever I stand, there will now be a holy place.” And next to these truly satanic speeches, Feuerbach babbles his pious speeches, pretending to be a terrible nihilist, although the tassel of the cap of a homely man in the street, a kind uncle and a favorite of children peeks out from behind the mask: “By egoism I mean a person’s love for himself, that is, love for a human being, that love that encourages the satisfaction and development of all those aspirations and inclinations, without the satisfaction and development of which he cannot be and is not a true, perfect person. By egoism I mean love for my own kind, for what am I without it, what am I without love for beings like me? - the individual’s love for himself is as much as any love for an object or being as direct love for himself, for I can only love that which corresponds to my ideal, my feeling, my being.” 57 Such is the loving heart of our good-natured “egoist”, next to which lies a black, gloomy shadow from the demonic figure of another, clothed in the dark radiance of his prototype, with scorched wings and the mark of the curse of eternal loneliness. Is it possible to imagine a more instructive spectacle than this collision of two “egoists”, of which one walked his way to the end and stopped at the pole, while the other raised only his leg, but remained standing on the same, reliable soil, depicting philosophical “running in place.” The ideological clash between Stirner and Feuerbach can in no way be considered a thing of the past. Stirner made only a weak impression on his time and was forgotten with too much ease. 58 But a new, later and more talented preacher of similar ideas appeared, who begins to exert a powerful influence on the souls of his contemporaries, who had hitherto piously subsisted on the naive religion of humanity of Feuerbach and Comte. With even greater passion and no less boldness, he tried to make a “revaluation of all values,” and most fiercely attacked the values ​​of humanism, which remained in the teachings of Feuerbach as “the fat removed from religion.” 59 Nietzsche - we are talking about him - reacted with particular hostility to the doctrine of love, blaming Christianity for it for the corruption of historical humanity, and for Nietzsche, as before for Stirner, Feuerbach, who imagined himself to be an enemy of Christianity and its destroyer, necessarily turns out to be among the representatives of Christianity. In the field of morality, in place of: love your neighbor, it was put: sei hart, “push the falling one.” In place of the democratic doctrine of the ethical equivalence of people, the doctrine of their different values, of the exclusive, highest or only value of selected supermen, aristocrats, for whom the rest of humanity is only plastic material, was proclaimed. Thus, everything is turned upside down. And the most interesting thing is that these ideas, expressed in an exotic form that was attractive to many, made a strong impression on modernity, confused heads, destroyed the spontaneity of previous humanistic beliefs, and became fashionable, while Stirner in his time went almost unnoticed and did not bother anyone. But, having resurrected in Nietzsche, he now casts his voice over the heads of several generations. Atheistic humanism is experiencing an undoubted and deep crisis, since its foundation, its most important democratic dogma, has been questioned. And this crisis, in our eyes, is still at the very beginning, the breakdown of the dominant worldview is just beginning, for, as Vl. Solovyov, “from the window of Nietzschean superhumanity, an immense expanse opens up for all sorts of paths in life.” 60 What these roads are has not yet been finally determined, but spiritual turmoil has already begun. Stirner and Nietzsche undermine the basic dogma of Feuerbach and all atheistic humanism in general: homo homini deus. For, indeed, this dogma underlies all its possible shades, constituting a common ground for all of them. Modern scientific theories of social development or progress can differ greatly from each other in theoretical foundations and practical or tactical conclusions, but they all recognize one single value - man, in the sense of any representative of a species individually or a genus as a whole. Liberals and socialists, Marxists and populists, any factions will practically agree on one thing: there is no God, but God is man and humanity. This does not always lie on the surface and clearly appears in the mind, but this dogma retains its force even when it is verbally denied. In the last years of his life, Engels was inclined to deny his closeness with Feuerbach, firstly, because he did not like Feuerbach’s use of the word “religion,” as if it was a matter of words and changing the word would change the essence, and secondly, because Feuerbach, with his teaching on love, was sentimental and did not understand the meaning of the class struggle. 61 But it is obvious that this last objection can only be explained by the narrowing of the mental horizon of Engels himself, for otherwise he would not have objected to a proposition of general, philosophical and religious significance by referring to a particular sociological thesis, which, whether it is true or false, cannot compete with the first. The doctrine of the class struggle answers the question of how, but not the question of what; it does not provide a goal, but only a form and a means, inextricably linked with given conditions and subject to elimination along with them. Class struggle in Marxism has the goal of abolition of classes, and, therefore, self-abolition; in this sense, it is also the path of love. Therefore, Feuerbach in his sociology could have been a Marxist, just as well as Engels, and Marxists in their philosophy remain Feuerbachians, that is, atheistic humanists. In fact, do they know any value higher than man and humanity, do they practically question the formula of homo homini deus, and don’t all their ideals of the future, the ideals of socialism, a free structure of society, be determined by it? Their atheism is the same anthropotheism as that of Feuerbach, and in this sense, all its representatives, without distinction of shades, turn out to be fundamentally opposed to the more radical atheists Nietzsche and Stirner, who, in the name of atheism, reject anthropotheism and, denying the heavenly God, do not want an earthly deity. “Religion is a person’s relationship to his own essence - this is its truth and its moral beneficent power - but to his essence not as his own, but as another, different from it, even the opposite essence - this is its untruth, its boundaries, its contradiction with reason and morality.” 62 The task of Feuerbach’s main work “Wesen des Christenthums” is nothing more than the refutation of the untrue, i.e. theological, essence of religion by clarifying the true, i.e. anthropological, essence of religion - this is the title of the two sections into which this work is divided. Feuerbach's attempt boils down, in other words, to freeing the religion of God-manhood, based on faith in the God-Man, from this support and turning it simply into a religion of humanity, without impoverishing it in any way, but only removing the theological cataracts from it. Feuerbach is convinced that the operation he is undertaking is, indeed, quite feasible and does not cause any significant damage, and the religion of humanity, devoid of any theological support, will hold up better than with its help. With conscientiousness and talent, Feuerbach carefully removes these supports from everywhere, consciously and consistently carrying out a philosophical experiment of enormous, one might say, fatal importance. He takes upon himself the task of a religious prophet, the creator of a new religion. Therefore, here is a decisive and fatal question: does the building, deprived of its former foundation, hold on without cracking, or has it turned into just a pile of rubble? And that “creature” (Wesen) of religion with which Feuerbach performs his operation, is it alive and vital or has it been dead for a long time and only its corpse still retains the former features of a living face, twisted and disfigured by death? And the new god to whom Feuerbach prays, is it a god, or a dead idol, or, even worse, an oracle for whom the priest speaks, no longer a prophet, but an impostor? In view of this, so to speak, surgical origin of Feuerbach’s teaching, which nevertheless retains an inextricable connection with the Christianity he denies, or rather, corrects, our general attitude towards it is naturally ambivalent. It cannot be accepted, but it cannot be completely rejected either. It contains the greatest and most important truths, but taken in such one-sidedness and abstraction that thanks to this they turn into equally great delusions. Those statements that Feuerbach retains from the Christianity he rejected are true, but by accepting these derivative truths, he denies at the same time the much more important truths that ground them, and the result is a strange mixture of monstrosities, contradictions and paradoxes, a labyrinth in which one must look for ways. Two great and important truths are expressed with great emphasis and energy in the teachings of Feuerbach: first, that man and humanity have an unconditional religious significance, in other words, that man for man or humanity for the individual is and should be a religious shrine, to use Feuerbach’s expression, to be an earthly god, as if an absolute; the second truth is that humanity is a single whole, in which individuals are only separate parts, outside of it losing all meaning and all significance, and this unity is not an abstraction, does not exist only in abstraction, but is quite real, humanity is a living and collective organism. Both of these truths about the highest dignity of the human race and about its real unity, organically connected with each other, represent the positive part of Feuerbach’s teaching, but the negative side of it is that he puts them in direct connection, seeks to present them as necessary conclusions from the philosophy of atheism, and thereby undermines both teachings at their core. Believing the essence of his worldview in atheism, Feuerbach undermines his humanism, wages a continuous struggle with himself, and is torn by irreconcilable contradictions. Let's take a closer look at this instructive struggle. Let's start with the first thesis, about the religious significance of humanity. In Feuerbach’s language, it is formulated not in the sense that man is divine only in the sense of his potential abilities and ultimate destiny, but in the completely opposite sense: there is no God, and therefore man is God to man, that is, it is formulated as a conclusion from atheism, as its synonym or the concave side of the relief. But anthropotheism, as a conclusion from atheism, contains an internal contradiction, because in relation to particulars it affirms what it denies in general, namely, by destroying God, it strives to preserve the divine, the sacred. The internal and necessary dialectic of atheism therefore leads from anthropotheism to religious nihilism, to the denial of every shrine, every value, or, what is the same, to the elevation of a fact, just because it is a fact, to the rank of the highest value, to giving religious significance to the fact as such. Atheism accomplished this dialectic during the lifetime of Feuerbach in the teaching of Stirner, the preacher of nihilism, immoralism and “egoism,” the “destroyer of sacred things” (Entheiliger). We have already become acquainted with this significant episode in the history of thought and we know that the winner in this clash of two thinkers should be considered not Feuerbach, but Stirner. For a consistent and sincere atheist, who does not abandon old religious beliefs for practical use, there is no salvation from deadening nihilism, from the murderous emptiness of complete loneliness, and not loneliness in the desert or imprisonment, but loneliness among people, separation from them. And, indeed, if the highest, absolute value, the source of all derivative values, is rejected and declared non-existent, then what logical, and even moral, possibility exists to establish itself on a relative, derivative value, which, like the moon, reflects the light from the sun and goes out along with the latter? After all, humanity, considered in the Natural order, and not the religious one, is still only a fact of the external world, a fact of biology, history, sociology, etc., in this capacity not fundamentally different from other facts or objects of the external world, such as, for example, a stone or a mountain or this table. There is, of course, a huge qualitative difference between these facts, but not a fundamental one, not in value or rank. The deification of a fact, that is, the attribution to a fact, derivative and relative, of the meaning of absolute value, the predicate of divinity, is the worship of an idol, in ordinary language called idolatry. And if our ancestors and modern savages worship as a deity the objects of the physical world - stone, animal, heavenly bodies, then Feuerbach in the same way proposes to worship humanity, the totality of homo sapiens individuals. And if a modern person, entering an idol, will find nothing there except ugly dolls and figures, then in Feuerbach’s idol a real atheist will also find only idols, albeit of an abstract nature, and will laugh at them. Having removed the head, do not tug at the hair, Stirner could have said to the pious atheist Feuerbach, “having rejected the absolute, one must abandon piety, and not try to preserve all its attributes, attributing them to a being that is obviously non-absolute. The contradiction is not original, there is no need to even insist on this. Stirner is right: atheism and nihilism, no matter what form they take, are synonyms. Either there is a Supreme above me, before Whom I prostrate myself, or I am above myself and know nothing above myself, and ego (and not homo) is deus sum. Idolatry is understandable and natural in the era of the dark and naive consciousness of humanity, especially since then idolatry was not atheism at all, and idols had the meaning of truly sacred images. But the position of a thinker of the 19th century, who came from Hegel, who consequently lost all naivety and spontaneity and was forced, due to internal spiritual necessity, to create for himself a known idol, preach its divinity and pray to him, is difficult, and this idol is not some unattainable luminary or unknown creature, but ourselves, we and our friends, wives and children, their acquaintances, the acquaintances of their acquaintances, our ancestors and our descendants, i.e. humanity. Such a person must experience constant tragedy, be tormented by burning contradiction, languish from inner restlessness, and this is one of the reasons why Feuerbach could never stop at the final formulation of his teaching; all his life he processed it, often only repeating old thoughts in other words and, as if with the sound of new words, trying to drown out internal doubts. This anxiety is the whole of Feuerbach, his best, noblest essence, and it is surprising if this struggle and this anxiety are visible behind the mask of dogmatic, militant atheism. Man is sacred, and humanity is sacred, it has an absolute religious purpose. Feuerbach felt this deeply. A special merit - not of logic, but of his human intuition - must be attributed to him for the fact that he spoke specifically about the religion of mankind, that, with all his atheism, he did not deny, but preached religion. In this way he becomes ten heads taller than those who seek to abolish not only this or that form of religion, but also religious adoration in general, and at the same time turn away with an arrogant grimace from the real destroyer of sacred things, Stirner. Wherever there are absolute values, an object of worship, a shrine, whatever it may be - in the abstract idea of ​​​​humanity or in the letter of the Erfurt program - there is religion, and it does little honor to the insight of Engels and Marx that, while maintaining the philosophy of Feuerbach, they diligently - in their atheistic and materialistic fanaticism - eliminate his religion. And, of course, the only conceivable form of atheistic religion remains the religion of humanity, the adoration of man, as Feuerbach preached. Either God or man - this is Feuerbach's alternative. Meanwhile, in fact, not only is there no opposition here, either - or, but both of these concepts are inextricably linked, actually uniting in the concept of God-manhood. Faith in God is faith in man, and without this faith man turns into a strange, bipedal creature full of incomprehensible contradictions. But it is impossible to separate these faiths from one another, and any attempt to give a religion to humanity without God is an extra argument a contrario in favor of this truth, and we have a similar attempt in Feuerbach. Man and humanity are the highest revelation of the Divine, for whose sake this world was created, which is the mediator between the Creator and creation, the soul of the world. Only man has the ability to freely and consciously assimilate divine content; only in him does the absolute find its other, its image and its likeness. Because of this, humanity has the potential for endless development, the ability for true progress leading to a real outgrowth of itself, not just empty and pompous claims to superhumanity. The growth of humanity from the dark created element to the bright communion with God and knowledge of God, from beast-humanity to God-humanity fills the historical process. For this process, the free human element is equally necessary, actively assimilating the revealed divine content, and this revelation of the Divine, many-part and diverse, is also necessary. The Divine, unchangeable and absolute, has in humanity its own image, its other, which assimilates this absolute content in the historical process; humanity is in this sense becoming absolute. It is obvious that the possibility of revelation of the absolute, the possibility of the divine-human process, presupposes in man certain abilities, a certain spiritual affinity, the “image and likeness” of the absolute. If we eliminate this assumption and stand on the basis of deism, which reduces the deity, in Feuerbach’s beautiful expression, to the role of Titularursache, then we reject all possibility of knowledge of God and revelation of God. Regarding such a god, one cannot even say: he exists, because for a deity to be means to open up, to give life. God, who does not give life, is a contradictio in adjecto. Therefore, deism, the recognition of God an und für sich without any relation to man, is only a polite form of atheism. As people, we are capable only of human knowledge, but to be in human language means to manifest our existence, and the position that in general there is a God, but He is not for man, is an absurd contradiction. Therefore, deism, due to inevitable dialectics, turns into atheism, both theoretically and historically (during the Enlightenment). This is usually objected to by citing the anthropomorphism of such ideas about the Divine, as if it were unworthy and rude. But accusations of anthropomorphism are based on pure misunderstanding (unless, of course, they concern really crude ideas about God, in which our shortcomings, weaknesses, earthly properties, etc. are attributed to the deity). What is called anthropomorphism is in fact the only possible and accessible to man, human knowledge of God. By affirming His existence, we at the same time affirm at least some of His cognition for ourselves, and therefore, we attribute to ourselves the organ of this cognition, the ability for such cognition. But knowledge is a deeply intimate act, based only on internal affinity. We recognize, therefore, the divinity of our own nature, that is, the image and likeness of God in ourselves. It has long been pointed out by the great poet, who repeated here the no less great philosopher 1, that we would not know the sun if our eye did not have something solar in itself. Wär'nicht das Auge sonnenhaft Die Sonne könnt' es nie erblicken, Lebt' nicht in uns die Götteskraft Wie könnt' uns Göttliches entzücken? 63 Therefore, accusations of anthropomorphism are completely fair insofar as they mark the truth that the existence of God is inevitably the revelation of God, and therefore the Absolute Existing presupposes the Absolute Becoming. If there is a God, then it means that man is divine, and his spiritual powers also have a divine origin and a divine destiny. Thus, what is usually called religious anthropomorphism, i.e., the recognition of the divine dignity and image of man, does not at all serve as an argument in favor of atheism, as which, by the way, Feuerbach also uses it. Feuerbach tries to prove that man creates God in his own image and likeness, as objective, materialized desires of his heart, as a dream. 64 He inverts the statement that man has the image and likeness of God, in the sense that God has the image and likeness of man. But this in no way resolves the question of whether man created God as a product of his imagination, or whether man was created by God and is constantly aware and aware of his God-likeness. The metaphysical-religious question with this instruction of Feuerbach, which he takes as the strongest argument in favor of atheism, even considers it to be an exposure of the secrets of religion and a turning point in history, is not only not resolved, but in essence is not posed. Feuerbach in “The Essence of Christianity” and Vl. Soloviev in “Readings on God-Humanity” (and Schelling before him) come very close to each other, since the matter is about establishing the godlikeness of man, but then diverge from this common point in diametrically opposite directions. In general, these works have some strange similarity and closeness with the greatest contrast, for both of them, with all the abyss that separates them, are characterized in essence by their answer to one basic and eternal question, namely the question: what do you think about the Son of Man? And in the answer to it lies the answer to another question: what do you think about a person and about yourself? It is not for nothing that Feuerbach initially designed the title of his work to include a call to self-awareness: Γγῶϑι σεαυτόν. So, we do not consider Feuerbach’s anthropology, which he considered the most victorious and irresistible weapon in the arsenal of atheism, to be such at all, and it in no way authorizes him to make those religious-metaphysical conclusions in favor of atheism that he himself drew from it. Those data of religious psychology that were noted by Feuerbach also fit into the opposite worldview; this, however, has already been pointed out more than once. Having rejected God, the Absolute Being, Feuerbach had to recognize as God the absolute becoming, humanity being deified. Becoming was equated with complete being, and deification was equated with deification. The Absolute, in a process consisting of a mixture of the absolute and the conditional, the eternal and the transitory, was declared unique and final. Hence all further difficulties, all the tragedy of Feuerbach’s situation. From now on, he is doomed to collect the rays penetrating from above into the dark element, and with the help of these rays to illuminate what remains unilluminated. The basic fact of the spiritual nature of man is its inconsistency. Man is a living contradiction and, as such, a living mystery. Heaven and hell dwell in the human soul, this has been said a thousand times. Человек тянется одновременно вверх и вниз, раздирается борьбой различных и противоположных начал, которой и движется человеческая история. Эти непримиримые противоречия в человеке и не позволяют принять его в качестве абсолюта, каким признает его Фейербах. Для этого нужно стать на точку зрения полного нравственного безначалия, филистерского примирения со всем и со всеми, но при таком настроении вообще потребности в нахождении абсолютов не испытывается. В этом случае человечество обожествляется не за то, что оно собой представляет, но просто за то, что оно существует. Истинный глубокий демократизм подменивается своей противоположностью – демагогизмом, исключающим какие бы то ни было высшие критерии над толпой и ее суждением, и этой обманчивой видимостью воззрению этому придается особая популярность. The deity is a crowd, the titan is a crowd! - as Nadson exclaims in one of his most important and false poems. This side of Feuerbach’s views was especially easily accepted by modern times, and idolatry of the crowd, demagoguery, which is the opposite of true conscious democracy, is the most popular form of modern atheism, and only Nietzsche has recently encroached on this idol. In democracy, as in all human affairs, there are two possible aspects, two paths, two directions: up and down. What leads upward is the consciousness of solidarity, the highest unity of universal humanity and the community of the divine-human cause, in which, although “star from star differs in glory” and there are privates and officers, there are laborers and heroes, they are all needed and equally indispensable for the universal pan-human and divine-human cause, the creation of the kingdom of God, joint service to the highest ideal. The opposite of this is the tendency to level, to reduce everything to one rank, to recognize as legitimate only what is equally accessible and shared by everyone, to the unconscious desire to bring everything not to a higher, but to a lower level. This attitude towards the masses is an uncritical and even non-critical admiration for the majority, not only in what it is fully competent in, i.e. in regard to his material needs and interests, but also to matters of spirit, is now very widespread and is usually mistaken for democracy. The absence of higher scales, a consequence of atheism, led to the fact that the scale of quality was replaced by the scale of quantity, and Feuerbach was also guilty of this philosophical fall from grace. This tendency represents an ulcer of modern culture and is a direct result not of its democracy, which is not at all associated with the deification of the crowd, but of its atheism. Feuerbach's formula: humanity is God and the absolute - modernity practically implements very often in the blind worship of the crowd, the deification of the masses, and most of all, Feuerbach's direct heir - German Social Democracy - sins with this. Having extinguished the torch and lowered the tip of the dividing sword, Feuerbach finds himself forced, instead of the religion of humanity, to preach the cult of mediocrity, both moral and mental. You remember his monstrous, absurd teaching about how the moral perfection of the race is established, which belongs to it in comparison with the individual: different individuals are both virtuous and vicious in different ways, and if you take an algebraic sum, then the pluses will be reduced by minuses and you will get the image of perfect virtue - the race, which in this capacity constitutes the “objective conscience” for the individual. We consider this concept to be a completely obvious absurdity, equally outrageous to both the mind and conscience. You don’t have to criticize it, but only explain it. And the most instructive thing about this is that Feuerbach stooped to this shameful teaching not due to any private mistake or accidental obfuscation, but involuntarily, perhaps against his will, in a struggle with himself: otherwise he would have nowhere to go, and with the honest consistency and courage of thought that distinguishes him, he goes ahead, towards the absurd, reveals the secrets, the “secret” of his atheism, which, perhaps, would have been It’s more prudent and not to push it forward, but to leave it in the shadows. Let someone in painful, fatal moments of mental decline, despondency and despair, when one gives up, faith in man, in human feat, the beauty of the human soul dims, let Chekhov, who was poisoned by “gray people”, be brought to the thought of this amazing consideration that “gray people”, considered separately, of course, are not the first grade, but they are “gray” in different ways, and if we take all their shades in total, then from They will turn out crimson and bright purple, they will turn out to be a hero. Will there be a source of cheerfulness and faith in this conviction, will the clouded gaze be cleared, or rather will the despondent one be refreshed by a memory or story about one really good deed of one individual person, perhaps the pure smile of a child, not to mention the thought of that Righteous One, the “Only Sinless One,” Who also wore human flesh and grieved with human sorrows. Be that as it may, we can guarantee that this Feuerbachianism will be simply disgusting at such a moment. Feuerbach felt the same hopelessness when he wondered about the nature of truth. It is indisputable that a single truth is revealed only to the collective humanity in its historical development, and here, too, different individuals are assigned different roles: some are destined to be pioneers, go far ahead, remaining incomprehensible to their contemporaries, others are destined to immediately find an echo and understanding, some are destined to be creators, others are more or less passive adopters and guardians of what they did not acquire. It is true in any case that the truth is cognized jointly by the human race; here there is a natural and irreducible communism. But for Feuerbach this obvious and indisputable truth was not enough. He needed to recognize that truth is not only learned together, but also created together. To recognize the real truth, which exists before any human knowledge, means to already recognize God - for truth is one of the necessary definitions of deity - means to recognize that knowledge in its essence is revelation, although conditioned by the active self-activity of humanity. True to his atheism, Feuerbach, of course, could not admit any of this and again found himself forced to support the obvious absurdity (even if it was now shared even by such sharp minds as Simmel, but with an excessive predilection for paradox) that “truth is the consciousness of the species.” However, the application of the criterion of quantitative majority, the cult of mediocrity in this case is associated with obvious inconveniences, even greater than in the previous one, therefore Feuerbach immediately makes a decisive departure from his principle, declaring that an individual person can be a representative of an entire race and, as such, disagree with the race. Obviously, this limitation completely destroys the rule itself, and Feuerbach only tried in vain to establish it. So, this is what the great and important truth about the religious dignity and purpose of humanity led to, after Feuerbach turned it into an abstract principle and, not wanting to recognize the Supreme Content, deified the external form in which It is revealed - not the source of light and life, but the dark and dead elements. Feuerbach presented himself as a typical image of a philosophical idolater. The second truth of the greatest importance, underlying Feuerbach's humanism or anthropotheism, is the idea that humanity is one and that the race, the whole, exists prior to the individual and is a real being. This thought constitutes the Leitmotiv of Feuerbach's entire philosophy (as well as his like-minded and contemporary Og. Comte). He states the connection of the individual with the race, man with humanity, not only in the sense of causal dependence, which connects us with external nature, but giving this fact a fundamental, religious significance. The genus is a deity to whom every member of it, every individual, is sacred. Feuerbach comes surprisingly close and here to the essence of Christianity and its greatest truths. Humanity recognizes itself in solidarity and feels united - this is a wonderful and mysterious fact that lies at the very bottom of human consciousness. We are talking, we repeat, not about external causal dependence, but about much more. Of course, the causal connection between generation and generation lies on the surface and cannot but catch the eye. Generation from generation is in the same exact objective dependence as the type of agriculture is on climate and soil, the color of the skin is on the sun, etc. But from this fact of causal dependence it is still impossible to squeeze out this universal human solidarity in question, for this latter contains something much more than a causal connection. It affirms the moral solidarity and unity of the human race, a common conscience, common dignity, common tasks and ideals. We live and act not as individuals A, B, C and not as a mechanical aggregate or sum A B C, but as members or elements of the whole ABC, existing before and independently of A, B, and C and giving them a certain quality. We say: homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum esse puto, and this statement is equally understandable in all languages ​​and in all countries. We have the ability to be proud and ashamed of a person, that is, to feel on behalf of humanity. We feel satisfaction for a person, observing the creative flight of human genius and the beauty of human achievement, and we are ashamed and hurt - again for a person - when we dwell in thought on the downfalls of humanity. “Der Menschheit ganzer Jammer fasst mich an,” says Faust, entering the dungeon where Margarita is languishing, and perceiving the suffering of the girl he abandoned again as the sorrow of all humanity. And the higher the spirit and the subtler the consciousness, the more acutely this human solidarity is recognized, the deeper the suffering and sorrow for people, the more clearly the voice of not only individual, but universal human conscience speaks. The vices and sin of humanity belong to it as a whole; One person cannot free himself from sin at his own expense while all of humanity is stuck in evil and untruth, and one individual cannot fall without dragging his fellow humans into the abyss. Thus, the doctrine of the original sin of all mankind, which all mankind could have sinned in one person, becomes increasingly clear. This consciousness, this primary and elementary fact of conscience, does not lend itself to any rational, or rather, rationalistic explanation. It is rationalistically understandable (if it is still understandable) why I feel guilty for my own actions and their immediate results. But when I feel guilty in cases where this connection does not exist for the visible eye (for example, as in Chekhov’s story for the death of an unknown suicide - “On Business Matters”), or if the guilt in general immeasurably exceeds individual responsibility - after all, for some reason I feel guilty both in the Russian-Japanese War and in the Tsushima disaster - then I have to inevitably admit that, in addition to the personal responsibility of the individual for his individual actions, there is also a generic conscience, a generic sensitivity, not fictitious, but a real universal consciousness that lives in every individual. His voice may be more or less intelligible, sometimes and even often completely muffled, but it is there, this enigmatic, mysterious voice, and it says: everyone is to blame for everyone and for everything, humanity is united and solidary, and in this single and living whole there is no possibility of drawing a line where the guilt of one or the other ends. This greatest and deepest truth of Christianity in modern times in Russian literature has been recognized most of all by Dostoevsky, who became its real preacher (it is very prominent both in the modern theosophical movement and in the doctrine of karma). It is easy to give this feeling even some rationalistic confirmation, pointing out the causal connection of all things and the significance of every smallest individual act for the entire universe. But this theoretical position in itself is not capable of generating such a living, real feeling of universal human solidarity, living pride and living shame and repentance for humanity. This living feeling cannot be rooted only in abstraction, in abstract thought; it is obviously connected with our life, with our true being, although not with that side of it that is naked and lies on the surface of consciousness, where separation reigns, a sense of individuality, specialness from everything. It is connected with the side that is turned to the underground mystical roots of existence, where the individual really connects with a single humanity, with the world soul, and the mysterious, mystical experience of universal human solidarity is a voice coming to the surface from the depths. The real mystical unity of humanity necessarily presupposes a living, real, individual, and not an abstract center of this unity, which reunites it and transforms humanity into a living spiritual organism. This center is Christ, who inextricably linked Himself with humanity, the God-man, who reunites humanity with the Divine. Being such a living and real center of humanity, He could take upon Himself its guilt and its sins, and His cleansing sacrifice, His feat had and could have real meaning for all humanity, inextricably linked with Him. And as long as the sinful life of humanity, which has not yet been transformed, although it has already been redeemed, continues, we, not even believing in Christ, but nevertheless being in a real connection with Him, feel the pain He inflicts in His humanity, and this feeling is the universal conscience. And, not believing in Christ, but feeling within ourselves a real universal unity, we still try to keep this feeling within ourselves, recognizing it in ourselves as something higher, as a shrine. This is the explanation of the sad paradox that Feuerbach, an opponent of Christianity, preaches its fundamental truth: unity, solidarity of humanity, but unity without a unifying center, holiness without a sanctifying basis. But here, as in other cases, he is doomed to fight with himself, to chase a fleeing ghost. The unity of humanity - not abstract, but real, essential - he wants to rest solely on empirical reality, but this ground is constantly slipping from under his feet, because in its empirical existence humanity is not united, unity exists here for him only as a task, more precisely, as a norm or ideal, which never completely passes into reality and is not realized in it. There is no single humanity, and therefore there is no history of mankind, civilization of mankind, progress of mankind, etc., these are all abstractions and conventions; in fact, there are only individual eras, individual generations, individual estates and classes, and, finally, individuals, and humanity as a whole slips out of our hands like a ghost as soon as we try to grab it. Of the entire spherical surface, which in this case can be likened to the human race, only a few points are illuminated for us and are in our field of vision, and the entire huge sphere above and below is shrouded in darkness. Past generations, with their painful and thankless work, which we, standing on their shoulders, treat, however, for the most part with arrogant and condescending contempt, left us only cemeteries full of the dead, and with them we cannot be connected by grateful memory and a living sense of heartfelt connection. The idea of ​​honoring the dead, directly related to the idea of ​​the immortality of the soul and the coming resurrection, does not fit into positive consciousness. They were, but now they are not, nothing remains of their suffering, heartache, struggles and despair. These people manure the future harmony, they worked for us, and let their bones rot in the world. I am not slandering or caricaturing, because, indeed, for positivism there is and cannot be any other attitude towards the past of humanity - one cannot love abstraction and the ghost of the past, and the growing scientific historical interest, which, however, concerns more institutions than people, has to a large extent the character of curiosity and passion for various rarities, purely cerebral inquisitiveness, and not heartfelt participation. After all, now a modern economist can, in one essay, with one, one might say, spirit, prove that modern capitalist civilization is based on the extermination of entire tribes, the plunder of entire cultures, drowning in blood, and then with one spirit, boastfully and smugly begins to list all its pleasures and delights with the carefreeness of... cynicism. No, there is no need to dissemble: modern humanity is considered as the goal, and all previous generations are only means for it. But future generations are also a nebula in which the eye does not discern anything definite. It can be assumed that they too will treat past humanity with the same indifferent contempt as we do, and we will be viewed as historical dung just as accurately as we view our ancestors. It will “leap” safely (if you believe modern prophets) from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom and, looking back, will remember it with the same contemptuous horror with which we remember the times of the Inquisition. And then there will also be only one illuminated point, which will move to another place, but will still be surrounded by darkness above and darkness below. The greatest lie of positivism in general and Feuerbach's in particular lies therefore in its assertion that man is mortal, finite and limited, while humanity is immortal and capable of limitless improvement. With a positivistic understanding of human life, that is, with the limitation of human existence only to given empirical conditions, there is no humanity, it is only an abstraction, only an algebraic formula. Stirner, also an empiricist and positivist, but more consistent, was right a thousand times against Feuerbach when he told him that he bifurcates man into a real and an abstract being, and that the genus is an abstraction. Feuerbach pointed out to him in his objection that the “only” one needs a wife and children, and generally contemporaries. Let it be so, but contemporaries do not constitute humanity, the race as a whole, they are only an illuminated point of the sphere, and there is no and cannot be a whole. There is no humanity, its ghost falls powerlessly before the great equalizer of death and crumbles into separate generations, alternating like waves, and like waves, mutually alien. Thus, the real content of Feuerbach’s formula homo homini deus can only be this: God for me is my contemporaries, my friends, enemies, acquaintances and strangers. One can congratulate oneself on such a deity and such a religion. References to the fact that all of humanity is in an objective historical connection that unites it into one whole will not help either. So be it. Let it be proven, for example, that through the Bible I am in direct connection with the ideas of ancient Babylon. But, firstly, I am in such a causal connection with the entire physical world around me; my well-being is inextricably linked, for example, with the correct action of the law of gravity; Physically, I am connected by direct continuity with the entire organic world, with pterodactyls, with gorillas and with frogs, perhaps even more firmly than with the Babylonians. Secondly, and most importantly, this reference does not say anything, because we are not talking about an objective causal connection adopted by science, but about a living sense of consciousness of this connection, about that heartfelt recognition necessary for religion or even simply for a sense of solidarity, which is the only way that united humanity lives. Therefore, we should reject, as a euphemism, as a counterfeit coin, the concept: universal human progress, universal civilization; it is more correct to talk about the civilization of future generations, about their well-being and happiness, but not to use a part instead of the whole, and these generations - we do not know how many there will be, nor what they will be like - should not be called humanity. Modern positivism borrowed all the usage of words and, in part, even the range of ideas from Christianity, not noticing that all this, cut off from the living trunk, dies and withers, turns into an empty sound. The concept of a single humanity contains an irreconcilable antinomy: on the one hand, the consciousness of this unity is given to us in a direct feeling and is a natural and inevitable postulate, the norm of our actions, thoughts and feelings; on the other hand, this unity is mercilessly destroyed by death, which transforms internal unity into an external alternation of generations, and the consciousness of connection and solidarity into hereditary traditions of history, into a historical process. The only way out of the contradiction, the resolution of the antinomy is possible only if we recognize that history is not the final form of human life and that the results of the combined activities and labors of all mankind are, indeed, important for all mankind. But this view is possible only by accepting the Christian faith in the “future age” and the general resurrection, with which only faith in progress, in the historical creativity of mankind, and not individual alternating generations, can be associated. Otherwise, it turns into nonsense, into the embodiment of irony: was it really necessary to have centuries of suffering of all humanity in order to bring prosperity to unknown chosen ones for a short time of their lives? Only one winner triumphs - death. Feuerbach felt these contradictions; it was not for nothing that he criticized the idea of ​​personal immortality and praised death so long and verbosely; it was not for nothing that he was ready to save himself from them even at the cost of obvious absurdity. Having rejected the God-man, the mystical center that unites humanity, he began to look for it in the empirical world and, as we know, found it... in the state. The reader remembers that in the end the head of state appears in the role of God's deputy. This absurdity shows that within the teaching itself not everything is going well and is a formidable warning for Feuerbach’s followers. Religious anthropology, the doctrine of anthropotheism, is the key with which Feuerbach tries to unlock all the secret places of religion and Christianity. This critical work of his is of secondary and derivative importance, although there is a lot of wit and brilliance in it, but its fundamental foundations are given in anthropology... And if this universal key turns out to be covered on all sides with rust and breaks in our hands, we consider ourselves entitled to free ourselves here from considering the particulars of Feuerbach’s criticism of Christianity, since the fundamental judgment about it has already been pronounced, while the study of the details can only constitute a special task. If we put aside the individual characteristics that each writer has, then about Feuerbach, together with Og. Comte, it must be said that they were given the opportunity to become exponents of the spirit of the new time in its most basic, essential and deep characteristics. This characteristic is exhausted by one word: humanism, considered not in the narrow sense of a predominantly literary movement, as it appeared for the first time in modern history (although there is a direct ideological affinity and continuity between medieval and modern humanism), but understood as the greatest vital fact of modern times, starting approximately from the great French revolution or even earlier, from the 17th–18th centuries. Humanism and modern times are synonymous. Modern humanism does not know its Luther, or Zwingli, or Calvin. Leveling and democratic humanism does not need and does not even allow individual leaders to embody or create a movement. The “heroes” of humanism, understanding this word in the Carlylean sense, its “führende Geister”, of course, are not those giants like, for example, Mohammed or the mentioned heroes of the Reformation, but if this time also has its heroes, then Feuerbach must certainly be named among them. The spirit of the new time, its moods and feelings, perhaps more clearly than those of his more celebrated contemporaries, is reflected in his works. And this is the historical significance of Feuerbach, which is much greater than the purely theoretical and philosophical value of his works. Perfect God-manhood, which, according to the teachings of Christianity, is the Creator’s final thought about His creation, an ideal task resolved in the world and historical process, presupposes the free assimilation of the divine content of life, therefore, eliminating the possibility of suppression of the human element by divine power. Man, although he assimilates the divine content given to him, but perceives it in free creativity, in the historical process, as a result of the development of his own powers, as the real realization of the image of God in his own being. This assimilation, therefore, cannot in any way be just a passive perception of alien content; it presupposes a movement from oneself, towards it, an independent, human movement. For this purpose, the human element must temporarily separate from the divine, be conscious to the depths as such, a person must stand on his own feet in order to freely accept and assimilate the divine content of life. Thus, perfect God-manhood is equally impossible both without God and without man. In the historical revelation of the divine-human unity, which is generally accomplished dialectically through contradictions, both extremes, both possibilities of a one-sided understanding of the universal idea of ​​divine-humanity were tried: if in the Middle Ages the worldview of divine-humanity without man, or, more precisely, besides man, prevailed, in modern times the idea of ​​humanity without God or besides God prevails. The basis of the medieval worldview and the practice of life based on it was distrust of man and his powers, of his earthly interests and affairs. Monasticism was considered the most perfect and adequate embodiment of the divine-human idea. Less than anyone else, I am inclined to downplay the one-sided truth of this idea: intense idealism, acute experiences of the transcendent, powerful faith - with all these features the Middle Ages accumulated in the soul of humanity a wealth that we have not yet experienced, a stock of high feelings, prayerful moods, idealistic contempt for the transitory goods of this world. In the Russian soul, perhaps even more than in the European, these feelings are alive, connected with the common spiritual homeland of European humanity - the Middle Ages (meaning this term not in the sense of a chronological, but a cultural-historical era). And to this day, medieval architecture represents an unsurpassed and even unattained limit of tension in idealistic-religious art (just as the beauty of ancient art remains unsurpassed and unattained for us in a completely different sphere). And in comparison with these majestic monuments to the spiritual life of medieval humanity, modernity with its train stations and hotels seems so petty, prosaic, and philistine. You need to be able to worship this antiquity. And yet, the medieval worldview now represents for us, undoubtedly, the historical past, and, moreover, the irrevocable past. It has been experienced and overcome, its one-sidedness and its untruth are quite clearly realized, and if this untruth is still trying to test its rotten power over modernity, then what naked, deadening violence, without the former charm of the shrine, without the former radiance around the darkened face. The medieval understanding of the idea of ​​God-manhood was historically defeated by a worldview that represented its complete opposite and negation: humanism, the religion of humanity either without God or against God. This either-or contains two possibilities or two different shades, as it were, two registers in which apparently the same music can sound. But we will not touch on this difference now; for now we will dwell on the very content of this melody. Humanism brought forward with extraordinary force the earthly, human side of the historical process, speaking out in defense of humanity against the inhumanity of the Middle Ages. He set out as the first commandment what will be asked of all of us, regardless of faith: to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to visit those in prison, for what other content does the social movement he created have if not the fulfillment of this commandment of Christ? Humanism extinguished the fires of the Inquisition, broke the chains of slavery, which was easily tolerated by inhuman, exclusively otherworldly Christianity, it freed word, thought, conscience from tyrannical oppression, and created a free personality; he is now waging the last great struggle against the social slavery of capitalism, completing the work of emancipation of the individual. May these deeds of humanism always be blessed! The merits of humanism in particular here in Russia are great. And here, in Russia, there occurred the same clash between extra-human God-manhood and godless humanism, medieval and modern worldviews, as in the West. And in our country, the ideas of humanism inspired and continue to inspire the liberation movement. The entire almost revolutionary struggle was conducted under the banner of humanism. Our various social trends, starting with Belinsky’s Westernism, are equally populism, Narodnaya Volya, and Marxism; all of them, with all their differences, have a common religious and philosophical basis in the ideas of humanism. And before our eyes, now the liberation of Russia was accomplished through the blood, illnesses, torments and labors of those who have their saints not in the Christian church, but in the humanistic pantheon. So, one can say that humanism, which has taken the place of the medieval worldview, is a step forward in the general historical movement of the divine-human process, and, moreover, in a certain sense, in Christian consciousness. Emphasizing the independent significance of the human element, he contributes to the fullest disclosure of the great truth of God-manhood, revealing a new side to it. However, we have already seen and know that this humanism also has a different essence, contains a double possibility, the one-sided human principle expressed in it, illegally suppressed in the medieval worldview, first appeared, although without God, but, in essence, in the name of God. In this case, his apparent godlessness is only a protest against the medieval worldview, although, it is true, a protest that does not distinguish form from content, historical abuse from the essence of the matter, but having as its starting point not a rebellion against God, but the defense of human rights. However, an atheistic humanism is possible that is much more conscious and deep, fundamentally hostile to everything that exceeds man. This possibility follows from the very essence of the matter: if God-manhood requires the free participation of man for its existence, then man must be free to turn this freedom against this participation, to be equally free to follow Christ and to Christ, and against Him. In humanism, undoubtedly, there exists - and the further, the more definitely - such a consciously anti-Christian movement, in which humanism is actually a means of struggle against Christ. The great world tragedy, the struggle of Christ with the Antichrist, inevitably had to manifest itself under this guise and, moreover, more sharply and more consciously than anywhere else, for once the general humanistic credo is accepted and understood as a necessary practical application of Christianity, then, naturally, the difference in the last, highest values, on which both the credo itself and its register depends, comes to the fore. Anti-Christian humanism wants to limit the spiritual flight of humanity at the cost of earthly well-being; it, like once a spirit in the desert, proposes to convert - and converts with miracles of technology - stones into bread, but on the condition that it is given divine worship. He wants to finally extinguish that fire of Prometheus, which, after all, burned in the Middle Ages, and, dulling the tragic discord in the individual soul, create a kingdom of spiritual bourgeois, cultural philistinism. He carries with him the subtlest spiritual poison, devaluing his gifts and turning them into devilish temptations. And the concepts of humanity, humanity, religion of humanity in this use turn out to be, strange to say, only the mask of the Antichrist, his pseudonym... At its inception, when humanism was just beginning to oppose Christianity, mistakenly considering it the final and complete expression of the medieval worldview, it was still difficult to discern what exactly the hostility related to. But with the further differentiation of ideas and the practical successes and conquests of humanism, especially since the concepts of true God-manhood, which entirely includes the whole truth of humanism, all its concerns about man and the truly human, begin to be increasingly revealed in the minds, two currents should become more and more clearly visible: humanism with Christ and in His name, or against Christ and in its own name. “I have come in the name of My Father, and you do not receive Me; but if another comes in his own name, you will receive him” (John 6:43). Here is the divided abyss, here is the top and bottom, the right and left sides: in the name of whom? And future historical development will be given the opportunity to finally reveal in religious consciousness two principles, two irreconcilable opposites, still hidden under the general label of humanism. These opposites, which expose the human soul to its true metaphysical essence, are rooted, of course, not so much in the folds of a flexible mind, but in the hidden depths of the heart, in its free self-determination towards good and evil. Therefore, the entire humanistic civilization also has an antinomian, dualistic character, its value lies in the final goal, but this goal can be different and even opposite. This dualism is not accidental and far-fetched, but fundamental, metaphysical, underlying both the entire universe and the human soul. The source of this dualism is freedom, in which our highest dignity is the image of God. Where there is freedom, there is choice and division, there is also struggle, and not for lazy vegetation, but for irreconcilable and non-stop struggle, we were sent into this world, to build the kingdom of God through free struggle. Nevertheless, the necessary foundation of this kingdom of God, in any case, is free humanity, and the liberation of man in history, external human emancipation, which is the main task and main cause of humanism, is a necessary condition for this. Therefore, those who worked in the field of humanism, promoting this divine-human goal, the liberation of the individual, brought their stone for the construction of a new Jerusalem. And among these masons and workers, L. Feuerbach, an inspired preacher of humanism, a “pious atheist”, who, despite his atheism, saw the divine element in man and expressed his insights in a polysemantic and mysterious formula: homo homini deus est, will take his place. In recent years, some of Feuerbach’s works have appeared in Russian translation, such as: “The Essence of Christianity”, “Thoughts on Death and Immortality”. Even in a special treatise on the history of philosophy of religion, prof. O. Pfleiderer devoted only a few completely colorless pages to Feuerbach. Prof. Otto Pfleiderer. Geschichte der Religionsphilosophie von Spinoza bis auf der Gegenwart, Dritte Ausgabe. Berlin, 1893, pp. 447–454. Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, constituting the 8th volume of the old collected works, published by the author himself, pp. 6–7. F. Engels. L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen Philosophie, 10–11. (Since these lines were written, several Russian translations of this brochure have already been published.) Cf. a similar story by Herzen about the impression made on him by reading “Wesen des Christenthums” (“Past and Thoughts”). Masaryk rightly notes: “The revolutionary driving force for Marx and for Marx is not natural science, but atheism” (“Philosophical and Sociological Foundations of Marxism,” trans. P. Nikolaev, p. 423). In another place, Masaryk rightly points out that “Marx (and Engels) come from Feuerbach and the influence of Feuerbach on Marx was very significant, much more significant than was usually believed. Whoever understands these few pages about Feuerbach (these pages contain an exposition of his teachings) will understand Marxism more than if he had read the first part of Capital undigested.” In our country, N.G. Chernyshevsky, who was the conductor of his influence in Russian society, became a follower of Feuerbach. Lange. Geschichte des Materialismus. 6 Ans.” hrsL' von Cohen II, 73. This is partly the case with Jodl’s book “L. Feuerbach." St. Petersburg, 1905. Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843). In the second volume of the new edition of Jodl and Wolin, § 1. Feuerbach quite rightly states that “the periods of humanity differ from each other only in religious changes” (Philosophische Kritiken und Grundsätze. Article “Notwendigkeit einer Reform der Philosophie”, 1841, p. 210, according to the new edition of the second volume). Engels objects to this position from the point of view of his historical materialism (L. Feuerbach etc., 28–29). "Wesen des Christenthums", page 1. Ibid., p. 2. Italics here and in further quotations from Feuerbach's works belong to the original. Characterizing the emotional side of religion and one-sidedly reducing religion to one feeling (as if Feuerbach himself, dealing exclusively with the metaphysics of religion, does not thereby show how metaphysical problems cannot be eliminated from it), Feuerbach says: “God is a pure, unlimited, free feeling. Every other god is a god imposed on your senses from the outside. Feeling is atheistic in the sense of orthodox faith as one that connects religion with some external object, it denies an objective God, it itself is God. The denial of the exclusive rights of feeling (des Gefühls nur) from the point of view of feeling is the denial of God. You are too timid or limited to express in words what your feelings affirm in life. Bound by external considerations, unable to understand the spiritual greatness of feeling, you are frightened by the religious atheism of your heart and in this fear you destroy the unity of your feeling with yourself, imagining an objective being different from your feeling, and with necessity you rush again to the old questions: does God exist or not... Feeling is your internal and at the same time different from you force, it is higher than you in you: it is your most authentic (eigenstes) being, which, however, embraces you as another being, in short: your body, how do you still want to distinguish it from this being in you as another objective being?” (Ibid., 13). Already from the first quotes, the reader can discern some of the main features of Feuerbach’s style: his verbosity and manner of repeating the same thought in different words, the philosophical imprecision of the language and, most importantly, the constant, unbridled and illegible use of the word “Wesen”, with which you often simply do not know what to do when transferring it into Russian. With the help of this word, Feuerbach constantly falls into the hypostasis and mythologizing of concepts. Ibid., 54. “Faith in God, at least the God of religion, is lost only where, as in skepticism, pantheism, materialism, faith in man is lost, at least as he exists for religion.” “Theism, the belief in God, is completely negative. It denies nature, the world, humanity: before God the world and man are nothing, God is and was before the world and people existed; he can (?!) live without them; he is nothing for the world and man” (Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, p. 367). "Wesen der Religion", collection. cit., vol. VII, 416. Let us give the full definition of nature given by Feuerbach: “I understand by nature the totality of all sensory forces, things and essences that man distinguishes from himself as non-human; In general, I understand by nature... an essence (Wesen), acting in accordance with the necessity of its nature (No t a-bene: the definition closes in an obvious logical and even verbal circle - nature, acting with the necessity of nature!), but it is not for me, as for Spinoza, God, that is, at the same time a supersensible, abstract, secret, simple, but diverse, publicly accessible, real, reality perceived by all senses. Or, speaking practically: nature is everything that directly appears to man, regardless of the supranatural whisperings of theistic faith, directly, sensually, as the object and basis of his life. Nature is light, electricity, magnetism, air, water, fire, earth, animal, plant, man (to the extent that he is a non-free and unconsciously acting being) - nothing more, nothing mystical, nothing human, nothing theological, I mean in the word nature. I appeal to feelings with this word. Jupiter is everything you see, said ancient times; nature, I say, is everything that you see and that does not come from human hands and thoughts,” etc., in the same vein (“Vorlesungen übert das Wesen der Religion,” pp. 116–117). Wesen des Christ., 184–185. Das Wesen des Christenthums in Beziehung auf den “Einzigen und sein Eigenthum”, Band VII, 303. Das Wesen des Christcnthums, 324–325. Philosophische Kritiken und Grundsätze, article “Nothwendigkeit einer Reform der Philosophie” (1841), part II, pp. 219–220. Vorläusige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie (1842), vol. II, page 244 Vorlesungen, 29. Compare Kirillov’s reasoning in Dostoevsky’s “Demons”: “God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will become a god himself. Then a new life, then a new man, everything new... Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the destruction of God and from the destruction of God to... to the change of the earth and man physically. Man will become a god and will change physically.” Wesen des Christenthums, 20. Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, coll. cit., vol. II, 304, §41. Wesen des Christentums, 191. “A person thinks, that is, communicates (conversirt), speaks to himself. An animal cannot perform the functions of the species without another individual outside itself; a person can perform the generic function of thinking and speech, for thinking and speech are the real functions of the race, without the other. A person is for himself, together I and you, he can put himself in the place of another precisely because his subject is his species, his being, not only his individuality” (Wesen des Christenthums, 3). We read here, for example, the following praise of death: “Oh, death! I cannot tear myself away from the sweet contemplation of your meek being, who has so intimately merged with my being! The mirror of my spirit, a reflection of my own nature! From the disintegration of the unity of nature with itself, the conscious spirit arose, this universal, self-contemplating light flared up and, just as the moon shines with the light of the sun, so you, in your gentle radiance, reflect only the burning solar fire of consciousness. You are the evening star of nature and the morning star of the spirit; sensual fools mistake one star for two different stars. You shine for the wise from the land of dreams to the birthplace of the true savior of the spirit. Fools imagine that only after death, through its mediation, do they enter the spirit, that spiritual life arises only after death, as if sensory negation could be the basis or condition of the spirit. They do not see that death already presupposes the actual existence of the spirit, follows only the spirit and, as a sensory end, is only a manifestation of the spiritual and essential end. The morning star does not bring morning with it, it itself is only a manifestation of morning” (Gedanken über Tod ilfid Unsterblichkeit, collected works, vol. I:, p. 71. This passage is characteristic of the style and tone of this entire work). To characterize this argumentation of his, we present the following passage: “Just as the desire for eternal life, the desire for omniscience and unlimited perfection is only an imaginary desire, and the unlimited desire for knowledge and perfection, which is presented as the basis of this desire, as daily history and experience shows, is only attributed to man. A person does not want everything, he only wants to know what he has a special inclination and preference for. Even a man with a universal desire for knowledge, which is rare, does not in any way want to know everything without distinction; he does not want to know all the stones, like a mineralogist by specialty, or all the plants, like a botanist; he is content with what is necessary because it suits his general spirit. Also, a person does not want to be able to do everything, but only what he has a special desire for; he does not strive for limitless, indefinite perfection, which is realized only in God and the infinite Jenseits, but for a definite, limited perfection, for perfection in a certain sphere” (Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion, 361). Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, ed. 1882, p. 220. “Everything holy is bonds, fetters.” Brought to you by Botin. Ludwig Feuerbach, seine Werken und seîiîëj Zeitgenossen. Stuttgart, 1881. Here, for example, are two judgments of Feuerbach on the question of the divinity of an individual, which are separated by a distance of two pages: “Feuerbach’s “theological view” is that it “splits us into the essential and the inessential I” and “the species, man in general (den Menschen), the abstraction, the idea as our true being represents in contrast to the real and individual I as inessential.” “The One”! Have you read the entire “Wesen des Christenthums”? It cannot be, for what exactly is the main theme, the grain of this work? The only and exclusive elimination of the division into the essential and the inessential is deification, that is, the affirmation (Position), the recognition of the whole person from head to toe. Is not the divinity of the individual openly proclaimed as the revealed secret of religion?.. In this work Feuerbach reveals the truth of sensuality, only in it he understood the absolute being as a sensual being, and the sensual being as an absolute being. we read: “For Feuerbach, the individual is an absolute, that is, a true, real being. Why doesn’t he say: this exceptional individual? Because then he would not know what he wants, then he would return to the point of view of religion, which he denies. This is precisely the essence of religion, at least in this respect, that it selects from a class or genus a single individual and contrasts him as holy and inviolable with other individuals... To abolish religion therefore means nothing more than to show the identity of its sanctified object or individual with other worldly individuals of the same genus.” Here the divinity of the individual “from head to toe,” which was established two pages above, is already denied. Another example. We know that Feuerbach’s concept of “kind” usually includes the totality of humanity, and in this capacity alone it is the object of religion for him. However, in a dispute with Stirner, he concedes even this basic position to a strong opponent and gives the following definition: “Feuerbach’s genus does not mean an abstraction, but only you, another human individual existing generally outside of me, taken in opposition to a separate, fixed for itself I. Therefore, if Feuerbach says: the individual is limited, the race is unlimited, then this means nothing more than: the boundaries of this individual are also not the boundaries of others, the boundaries for modern man are therefore not the boundaries of future people.” But, undoubtedly, it is not this meaningless judgment that is contained in Feuerbach’s basic doctrine of the genus. Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum. 35. In recent years, it has become fashionable in Russia, where several translations of “The One and His Property” have appeared. Wed. a detailed essay by Mr. V. Savodnik “Nietzschean of the 40s. Max Stirner and his philosophy of egoism." Moscow, 1902 “The Idea of ​​a Superman”, collection. cit., vol. VIII, 312. Engels. L. Feuerbach etc., 26–35. In the forties, Engels was an unassuming and naive Feuerbachian, and no significant change in his philosophical outlook happened to him. In the article “Die Lage Englands” (Aus dem litterarischem Nachlass von K. Marx, F. Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, erster Band, 486–487) he says: “The godlessness of our age, about which Carlyle complains so much, is precisely its religious completeness (in the original wordplay: Gottlosigkeit u Gotterfülltheft). Until now, the question has been: what is God? and German philosophy decided the question this way: God is man. Man needs to know himself personally; to measure all life conditions according to oneself, evaluating them, to transform the world in a truly human way, in accordance with the requirements of one’s nature. One must seek truth not in otherworldly, non-existent areas, not outside space and time, not from a “god” living in the world or from the other world, but much closer, in a person’s own chest. Man’s own being is much loftier and more majestic than the imaginary being of all possible gods, who are only more or less vague and distorted reflections of people themselves.” Wesen des Christenthums, 238. Not everyone knows that these verses of Goethe represent a paraphrase of the saying of Plotinus (Enneads, I, 6, 9). A well-known debate on the topic of anthropomorphism of ideas and of God was conducted by Schelling with Eschenmeyer. (See about this in K. Fischer. History of new phil., vol. VII, p. 718., 720 In addition to this alternative, that either God exists or is only a product of fantasy, it turns out that a third is also possible, according to which God does not yet exist, but he will be created by humanity. This philosophical invention, which, in our opinion, is the most godless and wicked invention of the entire 19th century, belongs to the aesthetic skeptic and mental gastronomer Ernest Renan. Read the following exchange of opinions in his Philosophical Dialogues: "Euthyphro." So you think, like Hegel (??!!), that there is no God, but he will exist? Theophrastus. Not quite. The ideal exists: it is eternal; but it is not yet fully realized materially, but someday it will be realized by a consciousness similar to the consciousness of humanity, but infinitely higher, which, in comparison with our present consciousness, so terrible, so dark, will seem like a perfect steam engine next to the old de Marly machine. The universal task of all living things is to create a perfect God (de faire Dieu parfait), to promote the great final result that will conclude the circle of things in unity. Reason, which until now has not taken any part in this work, carried out blindly, through the dark aspiration of everything that exists, reason, I say, will someday take into its hands the leadership of this great work and, having organized humanity, organizes God (organisera le Dieu, even with a capital letter!) "(Renan. Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, 4th ed. Paris, 1895. Dialogue "Probabilités", pp. 78–79. Italics mine). Surprisingly, these ideas have found echoes in recent years on Russian soil among disappointed Marxists.