Difficult but Necessary: Conditions of a Contemporary Theology of Love

Abstract : Nørager takes his point of departure in the observation that in modernity “love” has increasingly and undisputedly acquired the status as the fundamental attribute of God. This in turn, however, has made a theology of love vulnerable to the critique leveled by Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued forcefully that God's love in reality was nothing but humanity's ideal of perfect love. Briefly rehearsing two of the most important solutions to this conundrum (Søren Kierkegaard and Anders Nygren), Nørager finds both of them unduly polemical toward “natural” love, leaving us with the idea of a dichotomy or inner opposition between human and divine love. Instead, Nørager points toward a new theology of love where eros and agape are recognized as differing aspects within a continuum of love, and where human and divine love are perceived as mirroring one another.     

Feuerbach and the Philosophy of Critical Theory

It is a hallmark of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory that it has consistently made philosophical reflection a central component of its overall project. Indeed, the core identity that this tradition has been able to maintain arguably stems from the fact that a number of key philosophical assumptions have been shared by the generations of thinkers involved in it. These assumptions form a basic ‘philosophical matrix’, whose main aim is to allow for a ‘critique of reason’, the heart of the critique of modern society, which emphasises the collective, historically situated and naturalistically grounded nature of rationality. In this matrix, Feuerbach's place has been only a minor one. This paper aims to show that there is more to be retrieved from Feuerbach for critical theory than at first meets the eye. The first section identifies key conceptual features that are shared by the central authors of the Frankfurt School. They signal a collectivist and materialist shift from Kant to Marx via Hegel. This shift is well adumbrated in Feuerbach's emphasis on the ‘intersubjective’ and social dependency of the subject. However, Feuerbach's decisive philosophical contribution lies in his insistence on the ‘sensuous’ modalities of intersubjectivity, that is, on the fact that the dependency of subjects on others for the formation of their capacities is mediated and expressed not only through language and other symbolic forms, but also and primarily through embodiment. This Feuerbachian ‘sensualism’ is a rich, original philosophical position, which is not soluble in Marx's own version of materialism. In sections II and III, I highlight the legacy of Feuerbach's sensualism in two areas of critical theory: first, in relation to the critical epistemology that grows out of the ‘philosophical matrix’ consistently used by critical theorists; and secondly, in relation to the arguments in philosophical anthropology that are mobilized to promote the critical project. In these two areas, Feuerbach's sensualism – his insistence on the embodied dimensions of cognition and action – represents a useful resource to resist the tendency of critical theory to translate its foundation in the critique of reason into a narrowly rationalistic enterprise.     

人的本质:从费尔巴哈到马克思--对《关于费尔巴哈的提纲》中一个重要观点的理解

把人的本质界定为“社会关系的总和”,并认定这只是马克思的观点,这并非是对马克思的《关于费尔巴哈的提纲》的准确解读。其实费尔巴哈已经从社会关系来界定人的本质了。与费尔巴哈不同,马克思自己首先是从人与自然之间的实践关系来规定人的本质的。由此出发,才能正确认识马克思所说的社会性的真实含义及其在自然生态问题空前严重的当今世界的深刻意义。     

Illusion and offense in <Emphasis Type="Italic">Philosophical Fragments</Emphasis>: Kierkegaard’s inversion of Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity

The article shows the “Appendix” to Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments to be a response to Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity. While previous studies have detected some influence by Feuerbach on Kierkegaard, they have so far discovered little in the way of specific responses to Feuerbach’s ideas in Kierkegaard’s published works. The article first makes the historical argument that Kierkegaard was very likely reading Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity while he was writing Philosophical Fragments, as several of Kierkegaard’s journal entries from that period discuss Feuerbach in relation to central ideas in Fragments. The article then shows how Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus inverts Feuerbach’s projection theory, turning it against critics like Feuerbach. At the heart of Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity is the claim that religion is a conceptual illusion, whereby the individual projects his or her personal limits onto the species and then projects the unlimited onto a supposed divine being. Furthermore, Feuerbach sees Christianity as rife with absurdities that tell against its reasonableness. In exploring a hypothetical transcendent avenue toward the truth, Climacus inverts both of these philosophical moves. He argues that on the transcendent hypothesis, the immanentist critic is himself a victim of an “acoustical illusion”: the absolute paradox of the appearance of the god in time is in fact not judged by, but rather judges, the critic as absurd. In inverting and not repudiating Feuerbach’s critique, Climacus reveals the critic as a Socratic figure who displays the heights—and ultimately, the limits—of secular philosophy’s capabilities.