...Feuerbach gave these thinkers a significant thrust in the desired direction—indeed, Engels gives some sense of Feuerbach’s impact when he describes it thus: “the spell was broken; the [Hegelian] ‘system’ was cast aside… One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect of [Feuerbach’s work] to get an idea of it. Enthusiasm was general; we all [that is, the Left Hegelians] became at once Feuerbachians” (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy [1886]). Feuerbach did this by relentlessly tackling the question of “nature” in Hegel, trying to preserve the Hegelian system and yet open it up to the empirical truths of science. His attack of Hegel was masterful, and revolves around the point we noted earlier would be important: for Hegel, meaningful or real actions have to be actions that have occurred; actions cannot be guaranteed to mean. Feuerbach’s innovation simply consists in saying that, for Hegel, actions or events are guaranteed to mean anyway, and they are guaranteed precisely by the nature of the beings Hegel says act and mean. In short, Feuerbach says that Hegel essentially relies upon the fact that the nature of beings is to mean; beings are structured to be meaningful or Spiritual. This structure, therefore, is not Spiritual itself, but natural, empirical, material. A whole realm of meaning suddenly opens up beside the Spiritual realm Hegel specified, a realm where science is at home.
The way Feuerbach went about proving this in his Essence of Christianity was by analyzing Spirit as a religious phenomenon. In other words, he analyzed Spirit from one of the perspectives that Hegel definitely was invested in employing in his analysis of reality, the Christian religious perspective: the reason Hegel was so concerned with having meaning be within the world and not outside of it as Kant or the Christian scholars asserted was because he wanted very much to have that Christian God within the world. Spirit, for Hegel, was essentially just another word for God; God was precisely what was named by the term Absolute Spirit, or Spirit (the history of meaningful actions) that was fully developed or complete. Indeed, the accumulation of meaningful acts throughout history is, for Hegel, nothing other than the development of these acts or Spirit towards a state of completion—in other words, towards God. History, then, is the history of God developing himself or coming to be. And since God or Spirit had a beginning, since there was one first meaningful act that resided at the bottom layer of history or before all the others, then this development of Spirit or meaning is nothing other than a development that proceeds out of itself. In other words, if we simply view the series of meaningful events from the perspective of the events themselves and how they follow or layer themselves upon each other—i.e. from the perspective of how they both exist as well as relate to themselves, excluding all other actions—then the meaningful acts will form a definite, complete structure and this structure, because it is piling only itself (meaningful actions or events) on top of itself, therefore can be said to develop out of itself, or develop only in relation to itself. In this sense, then, the history of these meaningful events is God not merely developing himself, but developing out of himself—and, it should be noted, this precise process is what is named by the word “dialectic.” Thus all worldly action brings about all worldly action, to the point where God, the Absolute is brought about. But what do we mean by Absolute with reference to Spirit? What does “the Absolute” mean translated into the terms of Spirit? That precisely is the question for Feuerbach. In order to address this question, then, he situates himself squarely within this dialectical avenue and thrust of Hegel’s work and refers to Spirit as God, attempting to cull out of the Hegelian idea of Christianity—which is, to sum it up, literally enacting God through bringing about or participating in (what Hegel determined as) meaningful events, events that are nothing other than events following from a meaningful beginning and moving towards a meaningful, complete end, developing out of or only in relation to themselves—to cull out of all this the real essence of Christianity...
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