Reading the works of early Feuerbach incites a cozy feeling in a Hegel-connoisseur: it’s that instant recognition that you are talking with a person who really knows and understands his Hegel – a very rare experience when reading books on Hegel. The occasion of Feuerbach’s article I am now reading is the book Anti-Hegel by Carl Friedrich Bachmann, a former student and a later critic of Hegel’s. Feuerbach is not intrinsically against the idea of criticising Hegel – or indeed any philosophy – as long as the criticism is intrinsic to the kernel of that philosophy, just like, Feuerbach thinks, Plato was able to criticise Parmenides and Spinoza Descartes. What such intrinsic criticism achieves, according to Feuerbach, is to reveal the limitations of the criticised philosophy.
Bachmann’s criticism, Feuerbach insists, is not intrinsic in this sense, but based on mere misunderstandings. Such a negative criticism does not turn against the limitations, but the very philosophical core, replacing it with one’s own ideas. Thus, Feuerbach gives an example, Bachmann confuses the Hegelian notion of identity as unity between two seemingly different things with mere sameness involving no difference, so that when Hegel is e.g. speaking of the identity of logic and metaphysics, meaning that our knowledge is intrinsically connected with the world around it, Bachmann sees nothing but mere confusion of two separate disciplines.
The main target of Bachmann’s criticism, according to Feuerbach, is Hegel’s notion of idea, which Bachmann regards as meaning nothing but a universal concept or genus, although Hegel’s own examples of idea are topics like life, knowledge and will – organic and mental processes. Armed with his own reading, Bachmann goes on to insist that Hegel is inconsistent in saying that nature in its idea is divine, but still does not correspond to its concept. What Hegel means, Feuerbach explains, is simply that nature is a mere determined modification of this divine idea – an organic outgrowth, one might say – and as such a modification not the most perfect form in which this divine idea appears.
More generally, Feuerbach explains, every determined idea – say, that of family – comes with its own criteria for the perfection of its exemplifications, making it hence understandable how there can be e.g. bad families, which still are in a sense families. Adding another example, Feuerbach notes that we do not deny that the essence of humanity lies in reason, just because there happen to exist stupid people. Thus, unlike Bachmann insists, we need not first empirically study what all concrete families are like, in order to describe the idea of a family, but instead, the idea of family is something we use to evaluate individual families – of course, this idea is also embodied in concrete examples, but not in bad, but in good families. Despite the idea being embodied, Feuerbach adds, this sensuous embodiment is not really of interest in comparison with the idea: for instance, when looking at a true work of art, the most important thing in it is the idea of art shining through in this painting, statue or whatever.
In addition to the notion of idea, Bachmann criticises Hegel’s notion that the history of philosophy would form a development, where the latest specimen contained all its predecessors: instead, Bachmann insists, history of philosophy has been just a random appearance of opinions contradicting one another. Feuerbach notes that Bachmann has simply misunderstood the manner in which the earlier philosophies are contained in the later ones, because integration into a more intricate system requires modification of the details of the original. Taking as an example Kant, whom Bachmann considered as evidence for his own position, since Kant famously rejected all previous metaphysics, Feuerbach argues that you can instead find traces of several predecessors in Kant’s philosophy, including skepticism of David Hume and apriorism of Leibniz. Indeed, Feuerbach sees Bachmann’s misunderstanding as a further proof that the latter cannot remove himself from the realm of mere sensuousness, where e.g. water of Thales clearly differs from air of Anaximenes.
Bachmann uses the familiar phenomena of sleeping, diseases affecting our capacity to think etc. as a proof that what Hegel called spirit is actually of material nature. Feuerbach notes that Bachmann’s examples reveal more the difference between individual human beings, who do have their material side, and the spirit as the universally on-going process of thinking, which individual human beings struggle to come in contact with. True, human beings sleep without being conscious or thinking, Feuerbach admits, but never do they all sleep at the same time. Furthermore, he adds, what awakens consciousness in us is the stimulus provided by our fellow human beings, connecting us to the on-going flow of spirit or humanity. In the best cases, we as individuals are guided by this spirit or one of its ideas, such as the idea of art and beauty are guiding true artists.
Connected to this idea of humans being guided by ideas is Hegel’s (according to Feuerbach) metaphoric statement that his own Logic as the construction of such ideas or categories describes the thinking of God before creation of the concrete world. Bachmann makes fun of this notion by identifying God with various categories of Hegelian Logic. Feuerbach insists that Bachmann is simply confused: Hegel noted that only some categories could be predicated of God and he never drew the ridiculous conclusion that the physical copy of his Logic is the very God. Instead, Feuerbach notes, Hegel’s Logic is a mere reconstruction of divine self-consciousness for the sake of individual human beings.
