For the modern historical and philosophical period, to which L. Feuerbach belonged, the problem of man and society was one of the main ones. A correct understanding of human nature was of fundamental importance for him. It also guaranteed correct relations in society at the horizontal level (the relationship of a person to another person) and vertical (the relationship of a person to the state and the state to a person). The existing widespread views on this problem did not satisfy L. Feuerbach. They were, in his opinion, not only erroneous, but harmful. He criticized Christianity and objective idealism for the alienation of the essence of man and its hypostatization. All the predicates, he insistently repeats, with which man gives God, are of human origin. Religion as well as objective idealism do not have their own object of reflection. They have appropriated what does not belong to them. L. Feuerbach demands that theology should turn into anthropology, and philosophy should be guided by the sciences about man as a natural, natural being, without rejection of moral, moral and spiritual attributes. L. Feuerbach's anthropological materialism was inconsistent and reductionist. He narrowed the concept of matter to nature, excluding society from it, and makes the basis of the latter morality or the “religion of love”. He reduced the entire spectrum of social relations to communication, excluding the subject-practical sphere, where a person acquires his essential powers. The simplification of human existence inevitably requires compensation. L. Feuerbach followed the path of deification of man and nature, declaring them an absolute value, which can be assessed as a contribution to the concept of classical humanism. However, the reduction of a person to a bodily-natural substance, the reduction of the entire totality of social relations to communication, as its consequence, has not the elevation of a person, but the impoverishment and distortion of his essential nature.
Keywords: identity of philosophy and religion, hypostasis, nature as a subject of philosophy and natural science, experience, anthropotheism, reductionism
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2021.3.78-83
About the author
 |
Juliet B. Byazrova – PhD (Philosophy), Assistant Professor at Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, North Ossetian State University; |