Ludwig Feuerbach und der Eingang der klassischen Fotografie

When Ludwig Feuerbach set forth his Principles of Philosophy of the Future in 1843, he might not have foreseen that the future of his own philosophy would pretty soon be crucially determined by Karl Marx. Ever since, Feuerbach is best remembered as an ‘intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception’ (Friedrich Engels), while his own endeavours toward a reformation of philosophy have largely fallen into oblivion. Historians, not only Marxists, would recognise him as an unlucky godfather that suddenly fell from grace. After Marx had become outright enthusiastic about the critique of speculative idealism, which Feuerbach exposed as a sophisticated continuation of customary religious thoughts, he just as harshly dismissed Feuerbach’s supposedly deficient materialism once and for all. As for Marx, it was Feuerbach whom he henceforth used to treat as a ‘dead dog’. And so did numerous Marxists in his wake. It was not until the early 1970s that Feuerbach’s philosophy would be rediscovered as a fresh source of critical theory. Most notably, Alfred Schmidt, so as to provide the concept of Historical Materialism with a more vivid foundation, seized on Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism in terms of an emancipatory sensuousness. He reviewed notions such as nature or production, central to both the Marxian concept of history and the critique of political economy, with particular regard to the needy human beings doomed to make history under different, yet invariably difficult circumstances. His own clearly Marxist approach notwithstanding, Schmidt eventually established Feuerbach as a distinguished materialist philosopher beyond the cliché of the helpful intermediary between Hegel and Marx. Now Falko Schmieder is digging a little deeper into the tangly relationship between Feuerbach’s anthropological materialism and the Historical Materialism established by Marx and Engels.