Ludwig Feuerbach
German philosopher (1804–1872), born in Landshut, Bavaria, son of the celebrated jurist Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach, initially trained in theology at Heidelberg and then in Hegelian philosophy in Berlin under Hegel himself, from whom he progressively distanced himself until becoming the most influential and systematic critic of the Hegelian left. He lost any chance of a university chair after the anonymous publication in 1830 of Thoughts on Death and Immortality, which openly denied the personal immortality of the soul, and spent the rest of his life as an independent thinker without academic affiliation, largely withdrawn to the small Bavarian town of Bruckberg, where he lived modestly thanks to a porcelain factory owned by his wife. His central work, The Essence of Christianity (1841), inverts the traditional theological method: it is not God who creates man in his own image, but man who projects and objectifies, in the figure of God, his own highest qualities —love, wisdom, infinite justice, unlimited power— thereby alienating himself from them and worshipping them as if they were external, hostile and superior to himself, in a process Feuerbach calls religious alienation. Religion is therefore disguised, unconscious 'anthropology': to know God is, in reality, to know the generic essence of man projected into infinity. This materialist and humanist critique of religion, which Feuerbach understood as a necessary and liberating step toward humanity's full self-affirmation once its own alienated qualities had been recovered, decisively influenced the young Marx and Engels, who praised its boldness but criticised its insufficiency in the Theses on Feuerbach, adopting the method of 'inversion' but applying it beyond religion, to economics and material social relations, in what Marx would call his own materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectical method.