Feuerbachs Projected Religious Consciousness

Within the Space of Hyperreality

Kristian Voveris
At the time of the publication of this volume, Kristian Voveris was on exchange for a guest year
at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Kristian is a fourth year student at the University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, studying Philosophy and Economics.
ABSTRACT:
Developments in materialism during the 19th century paved the way for atheism
and a deconstruction of religion. However, the work of Ludwig Feuerbach whose theory of
religion as a projection of human nature into an objectified form provided a basis for Marx
& Engelss materialism was largely contained from further study by their as well as
Stirners criticism, which objected to the abstracted form that the concepts of religion and
human nature assume in his work. I propose appropriating Baudrillards concept of
simulation and hyperreality as a way of explaining the abstracted nature of these concepts
while remaining committed to an empirical approach that focuses on the representational
aspects of religion. `

Upon reading a recent paper by Edward Slingerland, titled Who's Afraid of

Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science I was particularly drawn
to a launching point for Slingerland's defense of an empirically-orientedand consequentially,
reductionistapproach towards the study of religion. Slingerland enrolls the support of
Baudrillard's claim that all we ultimately have is representations each competing for the chance
to stand in for a Real that was never present to begin with.
1
This led me to consider how
Baudrillard's analysis of religion as a simulation made possible through its representations could
expand on the work of one of the most radical agitators in the philosophy of religion, Ludwig
Feuerbach, whose contribution to philosophy is remembered as a pivotal point for the
development of materialism as well as providing a basis for atheism. This pivotal point comes
from a realization that the source of religion is an objectification of human nature, with paradigm
hemlock. 1(2)
89
1
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York City, N.Y., U.S.A: Semiotext(e), Inc, 1983. 22
shifting consequences that reduce the phenomenon of God to the corporeal, historical
phenomena of religion. In this reversal of subject and object, the object becomes the main source
of knowledge about the subject. This paper will therefore motivate how an aesthetic approach
towards the representational aspects of religion viewed as a simulation can improve Feuerbach's
explanation of the role of religion in human life. Placing Feuerbachs analysis of consciousness
amidst a world where symbols are exchanged not for meaning, but for other symbols, in which
both religion and the concept of human nature can exist as simulations, would allow the
individual experiences of these historically universalizing forces to remain authentic.
INVERTING THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC
Throughout the bulk of philosophical tradition leading up to the 19
th
century, religion
historically assumed a vertebral role, being involved in all central aspects, from the basis of
metaphysics and epistemology to logic, ethics, value theory, the philosophy of language, science
and so on. The inseparability of religion from philosophy is punctuated by the fact that the
distinct sub-discipline of the philosophy of religion was not explicitly referred to as such until
the 17
th
century at the earliest. The treatment of questions about the possibility and nature of
God, his relation to man, and God as a basis for ethics is deeply imbedded in the content of
works such as Descartes Meditations. Hegels work allowed this to begin to change by
discussing religion as a stage of his diachronic analysis of the development of human spirit in the
Phenomenology. The place of religion with respect to spirit gradually progresses via the
dialectical process, beginning from a way of addressing the concern with the fundamental and
mainly ontological questions that drive philosophy, eventually attaining a separation of the self
from the divine through a developed notion of self-consciousness. In the Hegelian process of
development of Spirit, religious consciousness is the last stage before the developed
philosophical consciousness surpasses it for the triumphantly named state of Absolute
Knowledge. Despite a superhuman omniscience-implying title, Hegel makes it clear that this
self-realization of Spirit is less of a God-like achievement of ultimate truth than a completely
reflexive state of self-consciousness, in which spirit becomes conscious not only of itself but
also the process through which it attains this consciousness. However this overcoming of
religion follows Hegels dialectical process insofar as a synthesis is required to produce the final
stage, and the philosophical consciousness is manifested in fact, as a form of unity between
religion and philosophy.
Feuerbachs development of self-consciousness follows that of Hegel in the sense that the
religious consciousness precedes philosophical self-consciousness as the first, indirect self-
consciousness of man: man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in
himself.
2
Feuerbachs religion as objectified consciousness can be seen as an extension and
investigation of Hegels art religion of representation, placing its content into more explicitly
materialistic terms, and providing the basis for the study of religion as anthropological
phenomena.
Feuerbachs Projected Religious Consciousness Within the Space of Hyperreality
90
2
Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Evans Marian. The Essence of Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012; 12
In his earlier writings, namely, Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy, Feuerbach
stated his methodological framework by declaring himself as a radical empiricist, and thus
adopting a definition of knowledge as the immediate sensuous intuition of particulars.
3
From
this basis his critique of Hegelian philosophy unravels into what Gregor describes as the
inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, and the drive towards materialism that it implies becomes the
crucial foundation for Marx's material determinism.
4
In opposition to idealism, Feuerbach
formulates this inversion accordingly: We must always render the predicate the subject and as
subject the object and principle thereby inverting speculative philosophy to reveal the pure,
unvarnished truth.
5
The direct contention towards Hegelianism here is that Hegel took abstract
predicates and reified them as concrete subjects. With respect to religion, this is done by taking
the predicates of man, stripping them of determinateness or categorical qualification, and
projecting them behind the world to become God.
6
Feuerbachs central paradigmatic shift is in
seeing religion as a relation of man to himself, or more correctly to his own nature (i.e. his
subjective nature); but a relation to it viewed as a nature apart from his own.
7
In this sense, the
divine being becomes thoroughly anthropomorphized into an objectification of the human being,
and all the attributes of the divine being are, as a result predicated from the attributes or the
limitations of the human being.. The sympathetic character of divine nature in relation to the
telos of man is no longer a mystery, and man is no longer striving to attain the divine value, he is
instead creating the values of the divine in order to attain consciousness of himself. This
consciousness, however, is indirect, and has an inherent element of alienation in its form.
Feuerbachs radical move is to see the dialectic as a dialectic of consciousness rooted in
the very condition of material human existence
8
, which consists of human needs, interests and
wants which are inherent in the interdependence of human beings with other human beings and
nature. Since the mechanisms of this dialectic are all dependent on sensible experience, the
human sensibility, Sinnlichkeit, is then an expression of the material conditions of human
experience.
9
However, Feuerbachs notion of materialism is not so radical as to require a
reductionism to the basic atomic level. What he is actively opposed to is his perceived tendency
of speculative philosophy towards transforming the real, sensuously grounded attributes of
mankind into transcendent subjects which are self-subsistent as a result of their abstracted
hemlock. 1(2)
91
3
Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 20
4
Gregor, James. "Marx, Feuerbach and the Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic." Science & Society. 29.1 (1965):
66-80.
5
Feuerbach quoted in Gregor, James. "Marx, Feuerbach and the Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic." Science &
Society. 29.1 (1965)
6
ibid 69
7
Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Evans Marian. The Essence of Chrstianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012; 14
8
Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 20
9
ibid
conception, yet ultimately vacuous in content.
10
Both theology and philosophy are potential
victims of this alienating drive, and the solution is a deceptively straightforward one: the
requirement that the predicates that have been exalted to self-subsistence be ascribed to real
subjects. Philosophy, he proposes, does not rest on an Understanding per se, on an absolute,
nameless understanding, belonging one knows not to whom, but on the understanding of man,
with the abstractions of Idealism as his target. This philosophy has for its principle, not the
Absolute Identity of Schelling, not the Absolute Mind of Hegel, in short, no abstract, merely
conceptual Being, but a real being, the true Ens realissimum man.
11

Once God is established as an entirely human concept, it follows that religion must be
studied through its material manifestations throughout human history. The role of religious
representation - whether in oral tradition, image, writing, or any other tangible form becomes
more relevant to gaining knowledge about religion than any attempt to access the idea of divinity
through a purely rational process. This opens the way towards the study of religion by empirical
means, with anthropological analysis of its representations assuming the focal point. This
reduction of religion to anthropology is in fact a part of Feuerbachs larger task of
characterizing philosophy as nothing but the process of human self-understanding, as the
attempt at human self-knowledge
12
. By bringing the nature of philosophy back to a human life
activity, Feuerbach hopes to demystify it, and recognize it for its positive anthropological
content.
FEUERBACHS ANTHROPOLOGICAL PROJECT
The revival of interest in Feuerbach (Kamenka, Wartofsky, Morris) seems to capitalize
mostly on his anthropological approach towards philosophy. The anthropological element in his
philosophy begins with a recognition of the human as a natural subject, as both the content and
form of philosophy. Feuerbach perhaps goes to an extreme with the implications of this notion of
a natural philosophy by considering his own work as being a form of natural science, more so
than philosophy, as he claimed to rely exclusively on sensory observable data.
13
While this may
be an exaggerated claim, it underlines his predisposition as an empiricist when it comes to the
origin of knowledge. However, Feuerbachs empirical inclination does not in effect mean that his
goals were to construct a system that was devoid of abstraction. Instead, in a letter a peer, he
declared that the aim of his method was to achieve a continuous unification of the noble with
the apparently common, of the distant with the near-at-hand, of the abstract with the concrete, of
Feuerbachs Projected Religious Consciousness Within the Space of Hyperreality
92
10
Gregor, James. "Marx, Feuerbach and the Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic." Science & Society. 29.1 (1965): 70
11
Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Evans Marian. The Essence of Chrstianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012; 14
12
Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 3
13
Kamenka, Eugene. The philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970. 94
the speculative with the empirical.
14
The speculative philosophy of Hegel was therefore missing
an empirical element for him, just as pure empiricism lacks an element of speculation. The
ability to see the connection between the two as real, and not just conceptual, is inherent in the
conception of philosophy as an entirely human activity. The starting point for Feuerbachs
philosophy is thus a very simple statement: I am a real, a sensuous, a material being; yes the
body in its totality is my Ego, my being itself.
15
The concern in his work is predicated to be first
and foremost the common experience of mankind; an experience born of practical activity that is
accessible to any human.
RELIGION AS IT APPEARS
With religion established as an entirely human activity, the basic and foremost biological
needs of the human food, water, air, sex and the more complex ones arising from sustained
fulfilment of the latter love, social existence, creative activity, law and hope become the
content that is represented in religion. The Christian symbols of bread and wine the body and
blood are in fact effigial forms of the basic needs of the human. This subsumption of the
symbolic under human nature serves as a distinct negation of the traditional unbridgeable divide
between the divine and the profane corporeal. The symbols of the divine no longer belong to the
divine realm but exist primarily as human created entities with the function of signifying the
extension human needs.
The content of religion and philosophy is the same for Feuerbachthe human struggle
towards self-consciousnesshowever, in religion, the mode of cognition is representational. As
religion is objectified in symbolic objects, the images of religion become necessary
representations, as he proposes, belief requires an image, or it becomes a belief in nothing.
16

On this basis I would like to move the discussion towards an aesthetically grounded approach.
I would like to propose that Baudrillards conceptual work on hyperreality can
significantly expand the exegesis of Feuerbachs objectification of human nature in religion,
particularly by giving the representations in religion a conceptually essential role in supporting
the entire structure of religion. His work in Simulations and Simulacra explicitly discusses
religion, reconstructing it under the radical framework of hyper-reality through simulacra:
before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or
idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real),
there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.
17
To render this point more
accessible I will first try to explain Baudrillards self-coined concept of hyperreality. In its most
hemlock. 1(2)
93
14
Feuerbach, quoted in Hook, Sidney. From Hegel to Marx : studies in the intellectual development of Karl Marx.
New York: Columbia University Press, 224
15
Feuerbach, Ludwig, and Zawar Hanfi. The fiery brook : selected writings. London New York: Verso, 2012.
16
Feuerbach quoted in Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge England New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1982. 231
17
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York City, N.Y., U.S.A: Semiotext(e), Inc, 1983. 104
basic sense, it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.
18
This is carried
out by means of simulacra, which can function by means of either real material objects, or
conceptual entities, however as such, their essence is not limited to their use value or objective
condition, but instead contributes to the existence of a simulation by means of the symbolic
order of things.
Religion, from a demystified, materialistic point of view satisfies the requirements of
existence in the sphere of hyper-reality, since the origin of God and the entire structure of
religion is misplaced within the divine subject that is held to be ontologically independent from
man. Feuerbachs argument that the origin of God is in an objectified human nature allows
religion to be exposed as precisely this kind of simulation. Hyperreality then works similarly to
this objectification in the sense that God, once unconsciously objectified into an independent
subject, becomes part of the real frame of existence of man, to whom the divine provides an
extension of the constrained and limited aspects of real man, such as the unmet needs of love and
feeling. But to function, hyperreality needs simulacra, which are in this case objects that allow
the divinity to be simulated as existing independently from man; and I would like to follow and
expand Baudrillards argument that the simulacra of religion consist of images.
Perhaps the most direct image of religion is the icon. Baudrillard presents this idea by
musing in character: I forbade that there be any simulacra in the temples because the divinity
that animates nature can never be represented.
19
Indeed it can, he sharply retorts, and continues
to argue this on the basis of the power of icons that have been historically used to animate
divinity. While orthodox theology would consider icons and religious images as lower-rank
representations of Platonically ideal divine images, Baudrillard ascribes the value of the icons
through their negation the iconoclasts. One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of
disdaining and negating images, were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to
the iconolaters who only saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God.
20

By negating the images of religion, the iconoclasts ascribed to them the value that those who
revered them assumed for granted and were unable to discern. The very real danger that
iconoclasm posed to Christianity, and the reaction to it from the church authorities, especially
those of the early Byzantine or the later Catholic church, were historically of great significance.
The power of the image as simulacra to the simulation of religion resonates with a particular
argument with respect to the role of the image that Feuerbach derives from his central argument
of the objectified nature of religion. Namely he proposes that the value of religious art, music
and especially architecture, is not in dedication to the divine, but in reverence to the abilities of
man to create such an object. The magnificence and constructed reverence that these objects
attain, whether it is the Sistine Chapel, St. Peters Basilica, ancient structures like the Pyramids,
or even the Megachurches of evangelized America today, ultimately point back towards their
makers and those who make them possible through economic and political means.
Feuerbachs Projected Religious Consciousness Within the Space of Hyperreality
94
18
ibid 1
19
ibid 5 (in quotations in text)
20
ibid 5
Having begun to establish the simulating role of religious art, I believe it would be
illuminating to return to Hegels concept of art religion, through a critical analysis of the
function of religious representations as simulacra. For Hegel, the representation of gods through
the arts develops in a similarly diachronic way, with the artist creating a statue or visual likeness
of god bearing the role of the intermediary between God and man. The limitation of this basic
form of representation is the artists inability to remove themselves from the artwork, a
qualification that would require a productive analogue of the Kantian disinterested aesthetic
appreciation that is inherently self-contradictory. The muteness of the gods in visually
represented form is then addressed by making them speak through hymns, which Hegel ascribes
as a higher element of representation. This higher element is Language an outer reality that is
immediately self-conscious existence The god therefore who has language for the element of
his shape is the work of art that is in its own self inspired, that possesses immediately in its outer
existence the pure activity, which when it existed as a thing, was in contrast to it.
21
The
linguistic aspect of the hymn expands its ability to represent divinity, however the representation
of god is present in an impermanent way, as opposed to the permanent nature of the statue, and
therefore a move towards a form of religious life through cult which unifies both the verbal and
the visually represented media. As part of the process of cult, the construction of holy buildings
is an action that transcends the particularity of the individual artist, as it begins with the pure
sacrificial dedication of a possession, which the owner, without any apparent advantage to
himself, pours out or lets rise up in smoke.
22
In this action the owner of the object of this
dedication renounces his right of possession, in a move towards attaining universality, yet the
result misses this goal altogether. Instead the objects once again attain reverence but instead of
being directed at the individual artist or architect, the result becomes a display of economic
conditions and political power for the greater order, the society or nation that these objects
belong to. Their value as religious objects remains upheld by virtue of a simulated aspect; the
symbolism and iconic value of any religious structure still presents the foreground and points
upwards towards the divine.
Greek drama was postulated by Hegel as a culmination of religion in the form of art,
preceding the moment of Spirits transcendence of art religion by means of the incarnation of
God.
23
Until then, art played the largest role in simulating religion and representing the relation
of God to man. This relation is very strikingly illustrated by the various forms of Greek theatre.
The epic, to begin, could be considered the most universal form of any of the Greek drama,
occurring as far back as the pre-historic frame of oral traditions within most cultures, and as such
existing with a degree of universality among mankind. In the epic, the gods are guides and
masters of the determinate actions and destinies of the heroes. The particular, individual self is
placed against the universal and positive nature of the divine, and as such the self only attains
self-consciousness in relation to the divine, as in Feuerbachs alienated nature of religion.
hemlock. 1(2)
95
21
Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Unpublished (Draft).
Cambridge University Press, 2013. eBook. 632-633
22
ibid 634
23
Ibid 189
The relation of God and man shifts pivotally in the tragedy, in which individuals are
visibly more in control of their destinies in relation to the Gods. The human beings of the
tragedies are depicted as having attained a self-consciousness that is independent of the divine,
and act with the knowledge of their own rights and powers. The heroes and heroines of tragedies
speak for themselves, but the divine is still present as a form of demarcation of the limits of
human individuality. This is carried out by means of the Chorus, which Hegelin a manner
expanded upon by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedycapitalized upon as embodying the sense
of powerlessness of the human in relation to the gods. With a Dionysian intoxication as its mode
of operation, the chorus functions by assigning to fate the role of the divine, which cannot be
mediated by reason, and instead exhibits its catharsis upon the human by means of the lyrical.
This powerlessness clings to the consciousness of an alien fate and produces the empty desire
for ease and comfort, and feeble talk of appeasement.
24
In the form of tragedy, while the
subjective individual characters approach an independent self-consciousness, the divinethrough
the form of the lyricalremains the limiting and alienating factor in mans relation to religion.
The power of Greek tragedy which persists to this day is its capacity to engage
individuals into a dialogue with their own understanding and feeling. This capacity exists
through much of religious art, and for this reason the unmasking of the illusion of God through
Feuerbachs theory of projection does not discredit the value of these works of art entirely.
Instead the aspects of the artwork which remain validly emotionally and intellectually engaging
even to the atheistic modern observer remain so by virtue of the theory of projection, since
their source is ultimately the real emotional and intellectual engagement of the artist, of real and
empathetically functional themes. The interpretation of religious representation as simulacra has
a strong advantage over a straightforward interpretation of these works as representations, since
they are religious works only insofar as they pertain to the simulation of religion, while the
aesthetic qualities that pertain to them exist regardless of the religious content. For instance,
Breughels painting The Road to Calvary, upon a close inspection of its details reveals itself as a
markedly devotional picture, with Christ carrying a crucifix depicted at the center, Mary and
John and the Mourners of Christ in the foreground, and the hill of Calvary in the distant right
corner. The same painting, however, contains a much broader range of subjects than just the
story of crucifixion alone: there is a commotion of grief, torture, and above all a callousness of a
certain superstitious drive. The multiplicity of interpretations and experiences originating in one
piece of artwork suggests that the religious content for which the artwork serves as simulacra is
only one of these possibilities. The requirement for experiencing this religious content ultimately
depends to the projection of self through religious consciousness into the artwork.
RETURNING TO MARXS CRITICISM
Self-consciousness, for Feuerbach, is not a dialogue of self-consciousness of the self with
the other within itselfvia the Hegelian process of alienation and its overcomingbut a dialogue
of the self with a distinctly sensible other, which is materially real. The object becomes the
Feuerbachs Projected Religious Consciousness Within the Space of Hyperreality
96
24
Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Terry Pinkard. Unpublished (Draft).
Cambridge University Press, 2013. eBook. 651
other for us through the awareness of the selfs dependency on it, through the very real and
material human needs, whether they are of biological or sentimental nature. This is the essential
philosophical content of the Essence of Christianity, but it is attained through a criticism of
religion, and partially because of this approach, the object of the other ultimately remains within
the category of belief. This inability to establish the sensible object outside of the category of
belief is, for Marx and Engels criticism, Feuerbachs greatest shortcoming, as the understanding
of the sensuous world remains limited on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the
other hand to mere sensation.
25
The abstracted sense in which Feuerbach sees the real,
materialistically grounded man whose consciousness he is describing is the main issue at hand
for Engels, who directs the attention at several maxims Feuerbach puts forward, such as Man
thinks differently in a palace and in a hut.
26
In this short maxim, one could discern an
precursory attitude to the radically materialistic philosophy of Marx and Engels, in which the
objects through which consciousness is made possible are not merely the mirrors of mans
consciousness, but exist reactively as part of mans consciousness, which shapes and is shaped
by his external reality. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really differentiated from thought-
objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as activity through objects.
27

The accusation of an inability on Feuerbachs part to see human activity as a materially
grounded phenomena stems from what Marx considers the chief defect of all hitherto existing
materialism, namely that all materialists who had recognized the existence of a reality
independent of men were unable to see that this reality, as it appears to us through real historical
conditions, is a product of human activity itself. Marx would probably argue that even
Descartes wax could be better explained by tracing its route in reverse through the chain of
consumer, distributor, manufacturer, and innovator of productive methods, than a meditation on
the its inalienable substance. The radical materialism of Marx is correct in that Feuerbach fails to
embrace the broader implications of the projected object of self-consciousness he discovers in
religion, and in doing so extend into a materially-transformative reformation of mans relation to
himself and others, however, insofar as this paper is concerned with the philosophy of religion,
Feuerbach is successful in laying the foundation for materialism by reconstructing one of its
main limitationsthe religious arguments for divinity and soulas a projection of human nature
existing objectively in material terms. By repositioning the projection of human nature into
religion within the space of hyperreality, its objectivity and independence from the subjective
individual moment can be preserved. The importance of the material, historical objects and
representation acting as simulacra in the preservation of the simulated religious content could
then satisfy Marxs requirements for a materialism that is grounded in real, historical conditions.
hemlock. 1(2)
97
25
Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Bd. 5, p. 32-34
26
Feuerbach quoted in Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels. Basic writings on politics and philosophy. Trans. Lewis
Feuer. New York: Anchor Books, 1989. Print.
27
Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach (New York, 1934) p. 73
STIRNERS CRITICISM AND THE DISTINCTION OF ESSENCE AND ACCIDENT
While Marxs criticism predominantly targeted the abstracted notion of thought-objects
obtained through human projection, Stirner's opposition is directed towards Feuerbach's
insistence that the human species and not the individual human being himself constitutes human
nature. The existential freedom, through an 'untranscendable particularity', which Stirner refers
to as uniqueness,
28
is strictly at odds with this foundation of human nature as being in the species
consciousness, which Stirner attacks as a form of naturalistic fallacy. In Stirners view, this is a
mistaken dissolution of the individual into the universal. Through his criticism he assumes this
motion that individual feeling pain, pleasure or emotion can be substituted or subsumed by
universal feeling. The problem consists in seeing these experiences of the species
consciousness that affect the individual through sympathy or jealousy as essentially universal.
In his response to Stirner's treatment of the universality of human essence in The Essence
of Christianity in Relation to The Ego and Its Own, Feuerbach first retorts by making his
approach less intellectual and focusing on Love as the principle that defines the common shared
human essence
29
. Love between the self and the other, first between the man and the woman, and
later towards children, and progressively further towards universality in relation to the
community through tradition. However, while the defense through basic human relations fits
accordingly with Feuerbachs project of constructing philosophy that addresses common human
experience, a transcendental concept of species consciousness remains contradictory. However,
his insistence on this concept of the species as naturally transcendent is upheld by virtue of the
ability of individuals to ascribe to themselves the values of a broader group of individuals
whether it is a community or a species in general through a recognition of the projection of the
self into other individuals. It is the idea of the species, Feuerbach postulates that brings
deliverance; for the idea of the species allows me to delight in possibilities which are mine
although I may never realize them.
30
Here too the framework of hyperreality can elucidate the
issue by helping resolve the contradiction between the transcendentality of the species concept
and the self-declared materialistic and empirical method of Feuerbachs philosophy. If we allow
the species concept to be a simulated entity, constructed by means of a unity of attributes of the
human individuals in particular, the universality of the species can exist as a concept within
hyperreality, allowing the individuals to attain the type of deliverance from the constrictions of
the particular, limited subjective experience that Feuerbach proposes the species can provide.
CONCLUSION
Through my analysis of the representational aspects of religion, I hoped to have
demonstrated how religion can be reinterpreted as a form of simulation. Analyzing Feuerbach's
Feuerbachs Projected Religious Consciousness Within the Space of Hyperreality
98
28
Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Trans. S. Byington New York: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1907. 126.
29
Gordon, Frederick M. "Stirner's Critics." Philosophical Forum. 8.2-3-4 (1976): 343-386.
30
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. Marian Evans, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012. eBook. 318
conception of religion as a form of simulation provides a possibility for a defense from Marx &
Engelss as well as Stirners objections against Feuerbach's work, namely the accusations of
transcendentality and abstraction which are at odds with Feuerbachs thesis of reconstructing
philosophy in material terms. By identifying the source of religion in human nature and
establishing its frame of existence within the space of the hyperreal, religion can be explicated in
entirely humanistic terms. The benefits of a retention of the simulated space, as opposed to a
rigid adoption of atheism, is in the preservation of the positive content of religion that consists of
projecting materially constrained human needs and feelings into a form of universality, albeit a
simulated one. Furthermore, reviving Feuerbachs materially grounded view of religion provides
a additional justification for the study of religion by empirical and historical means. Finally, the
species consciousness which is postulated by Feuerbach as a philosophical answer to religion,
once its illusory nature has been demystified, and remains pregnant with possibility as a
foundation for self-conscious and reflexive humanism.
hemlock. 1(2)
99
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Feuerbachs Projected Religious Consciousness Within the Space of Hyperreality
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