Thoughts on Death and Immortality by Ludwig Feuerbach (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 327 Their contributions are valuable additions to Albertine scholarship and complement other recent collections of like nature. Any scholar of Albert or of medieval thought would be well rewarded by having this volume. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. LAURA L. LANDEN, O.P. Thoughts on Death and Immortality. By LUDWIG FEUERBACH. Translated with Introduction by James A. Massey. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Pp. xliii + 261. $6.95. The first English translation of the complete text of Feuerbach's first publication is a welcome event. Feuerbach continues to be of some interest , if not in this country, certainly in Europe. With Massey's strong translation, English-speaking readers can experience at first hand the recent discovery of the early Feuerbach. If they do, they may be surprised. I. Problems in Interpretation Until recently Feuerbach's Gedanken uber Tod und Unsterblichkeit (GTU) attracted little attention. Scholars formed views about Feuerbach 's thought without consulting this seminal piece, published eleven years before The Essence of Christianity (1841). Why was it ignored? Perhaps because it is not a great work. The GTU, Feuerbach's first publication , is hardly clean. It explodes in youthful poetic exuberance and prophetic indignation. Even Feuerbach seems eager to pass beyond it. He publishes it anonymously in 1830, perhaps to avoid censorship or to preserve his academic reputation, and does not reprint it until he severely edits the text for Vol. III of his Samtliche Werke (1847). Then, rearranging the sections dramatically and condensing the manuscript by a third, he does his best to purge his Todesgedanken of the Hegelianism of his youth. Only in the last few years does the full 1830 text reappear to prompt a reappraisal of his early development. Apparently the GTU has been ignored for other reasons. It clearly embarrasses disciples, who do not want their materialist hero to be such a speculative idealist. Bolin and J odl, for instance, reprint the 1847 purged version in their standard 1903 Siimtliche W erke even though they realize how much Feuerbach revises the text. Marxist interpreters also shy away from the Feuerbach of the GTU. Typically, Marxists view this Feuerbach still as a student of his idealist teachers, one who has not yet 328 BOOK REVIEWS developed the inversion of Hegel which liberates Marx and Engels. The Marxist is not much interested in Feuerbach until the explicit break with Hegel (" Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Philosophie," 1839), or if Marxists do consider the early Feuerbach, they usually notice only the germs of his later materialism. Philosophers and psychologists of religion, too, ignore the early Feuerbach. The Feuerbach they favor is one gathered from a few snips of The Essence of Christianity, in whom they :find an incipient Freud and the parent of the projection theory. But since in the GTU he has not crystallized a theory of the illusory character of religion , he is of little interest. Theological critics, :finally, are hardly more attentive. Of course, modern theology and Religionsphilosophie quickly pass Feuerbach by, and not until Barth do these disciplines return to Feuerbach's critique of theology and religion. But the attention Barth gives is of a peculiar kind: Feuerbach, along with Schleiermacher, becomes :the convenient neo-orthodox " whipping boy," blamed for the theological sins of an entire century. The Feuerbach who sticks in Barth's craw is the Feuerbach of the productive 1840's, the one whom Barth styles as the great anthropologizer of theology. It is not the Feuerbach of the GTU who proclaims that God is the end of the :finite human and the worldly. The Barthian :fixation on the Feuerbach of the 1840's reminds us of a further quirk in the history of Feuerbach research. The Essence of Christianity (EC) so dominates the discussion that it becomes the official lens through which all things Feuerbachian are judged. A classic does this, after all, and EC is Feuerbach's classic text. The unfortunate consequence is that the power of a classic can prevent us from uncovering its own foundations. In the present case one text interprets all texts; in fact, one family of interpretations of the one text interprets all texts. Let me characterize this family...