Young Hegelians
1835 – 1848
Hegel's method turned against Hegel's conclusions, with religion and the state as the first targets.
- Active
- 1835 – 1848
- Where
- Berlin
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
If spirit comes to know itself in history, then theology is anthropology misread. God is the human essence projected outward and worshipped as something else.
What it held
Hegel's death left an ambiguity his students could not resolve peacefully: was the system a justification of the Prussian state and the Lutheran church, or a method that would dissolve them? The Right said the first and the Left said the second.
Strauss opened the argument in 1835 by treating the gospels as myth rather than history — not fraud, but the collective imagination of a community. Feuerbach then made the decisive move: religion is not false so much as inverted. The attributes ascribed to God are human attributes, alienated and projected, and theology read correctly is anthropology.
Bauer went further into atheism, Stirner further still into an egoism that dismissed the human essence as one more spook, and Marx concluded that criticising religion was the easy part. If people project their essence outward, the question is what in their material conditions makes them need to.
The group dispersed after 1848, and Marx and Engels spent a great deal of the German Ideology settling accounts with former friends.
How it argued
Immanent critique aimed at institutions rather than at concepts, plus biblical criticism, plus a great deal of journalism in papers that kept getting shut down.
What it was arguing against
The Prussian state, the Lutheran establishment, and the Right Hegelian reading that made Hegel their defender.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the human essence Feuerbach appeals to is itself a projection, which Stirner argued and Marx partly accepted. Whether criticism alone changes anything.
Common misconceptions
That they were a movement with a programme. They were a Berlin drinking club that argued constantly, and most of them ended up denouncing each other.
How it began
Strauss's Life of Jesus in 1835, which cost him his career and started the argument.
What became of it
Dispersed by the failure of the 1848 revolutions and by Marx's departure from the framework entirely.
Lasting influence
Marxism directly. Feuerbach's projection theory reaches Freud and the whole psychological critique of religion. Stirner is the founding text of individualist anarchism.
Why it still matters
The projection account of religion is still the most influential naturalistic explanation of it, and it was formulated here.
Put another way
A tool handed down by a master, used first to take apart his house.
Where to start
Feuerbach. The argument is clear and its influence is everywhere downstream.
The surprising bit
Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach — that philosophers have interpreted the world and the point is to change it — was written in a notebook, never published in his lifetime, and is carved on his grave.
In their own words
The secret of theology is anthropology.
Man is what he eats.
Connections
- Answers
- Hegelianism
- Opposed by
- Hegelianism
- Influenced
- Classical Marxism
The verdict
A short-lived Berlin argument that produced the critique of religion and, incidentally, Marx.