Bruno Bauer (1809–1882)
Part 11 of a review of Wolfgang Förster, Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008)
Förster discusses among the Young Hegelians Eduard Gans, (1797-1839), Arnold Rüge (1802-1880), Karl Friedrich Köppen (1808-1863) and Bruno Bauer (1809-1882). He notes that the Young Hegelians became more intensely political from 1842 on, orienting themselves of three major European historical developments: the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolutions of both 1789 and 1830. They saw the Reformation as an outbreak of human freedom, despite its often historically backwards-looking form.
Douglas Moggach describes Bauer’s philosophical work in his article Bruno Bauer Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 12/11/09. Bauer, like Marx and Engels, was one of the Young Hegelians or Left Hegelians, but his most important and influential works came after he had rejected the Hegelian philosophy.
Bauer’s lasting significance lies in his works on religion, Christianity being the focus, in such works as Kritik der Geschichte der Offenbarung [English title: Religion of the Old Testament] (1838), Herr Dr. Hengstenberg (1839), Critique of the Gospel of John (1840), Critique of the Synoptic Gospels (1840– 42) and Christianity Revealed (1843). Bauer interpreted religion as the self-consciousness of humanity conceived in the form of divine beings. It’s notable that his unorthodox view of religion didn’t stop him from asserting a very traditional Christian view of the Judaism of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible as a lesser-developed form of self-consciousness defined by the subordination of law, while Christianity represented a more advanced religion that effectively displaced Judaism with a higher form of humanity’s consciousness of itself. Even in the Vormärz period (pre-March 1848), he argued against proposals for the emancipation of the Jews in Poland 1842-43. In this he differed from other Left Hegelians and the republican movement generally. This was one conservative and even reactionary opinion Bauer held even prior to 1848.
Bauer eventually went on to argue that Christianity now needed to be superseded by a still higher form of consciousness, which in his Left Hegelian years he thought the Hegelian philosophy represented. Bauer was explicit in seeing Christianity as a staunch ally of the outdated feudal political order, represented in particular by the reactionary Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Bauer didn’t just argue that the existing Church establishments supported the established order. He argued that religion itself had this effect.
In two anonymously published works in 1841-42, Bauer argued – in a satirical form in presumably motivated in part by the need to avoid the censor – that Hegel’s philosophy really was as revolutionary as its reactionary critics held it to be and lead logically to the end of both the existing church and state. In his work from that period published under his own name, he defended the Prussian state as being one that would protect and encourage the development of collective self-consciousness and morality by evolving as the general consciousness developed. In both formulations, he took the position that Reason was a critical standard to which the state should be obliged to submit.
The Left Hegelians were developing the side of Hegel’s historical outlook that had held the World Spirit to manifest itself in real history in a process of constant development. Because World Spirit was Reason, reason could be applied as the standard by which to judge existing governments.
The Revolution of 1848, of which Bauer was an enthusiastic pro-democracy participant, proved to be a turning point for his philosophy. A few years later, he began writing for a government-sponsored paper, Die Zeit (not to be confused with the Hamburg paper of today), and his political sympathies took a decidedly conservative turn. He assumed a pessimistic outlook, which envisioned the development of a mass society of conformity to which liberals and socialists would contribute to creating along with the conservative-traditional governments. After a long period of confrontation between Imperial Russia and absolutist monarchies in western Europe, Western societies would collapse in some vaguely-defined apocalyptic fashion to be followed by an even more vaguely-defined period of new creativity and development of human consciousness. Bauer’s post-1850 works are generally not considered so significant for the history of philosophy. Moggach writes that “the anti-traditionalist conservatism and anti-Semitism of his late work link him to the revolutionary right in the twentieth century.”
Among other progressive, pro-democracy philosophers of the Vormärz (pre-March 1848) period that Förster discusses are Ludwig Börne (1785-1837), Georg Büchner (1813-1837) and Heinrich Heine (1797-1797). Heine’s liberalism and his belief that revolutions were not only necessary but occurred according to laws of history were tempered by a skepticism about the extreme implications of the trend of German philosophy. Heine was not alone in being deeply disappointed by the failure of the democratic Revolutions of 1848.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Feuerbach (1770-1831)Förster devotes a chapter to the Young Hegelian Georg Feuerbach, who is best known for his critical studies of religion. Feuerbach was particularly impressed by the skeptical attitude toward religion in the work of Pierre Bayle; Feuerbach published a monograph in 1836 called “Pierre Bayle”. He saw Bayle as having recognized an inherent conflict between faith and reason, and between religion and philosophy. David Strauss' book The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835) also encouraged Feuerbach’s critical attitude toward religion in general and Christianity in particular.
His book Das Wesen des Christientums [The Essence of Christianity] (1841) represented a “radical break with the Hegelian philosophy”, writes Förster. He argued that belief in God was at bottom a reflection of human egotism, “nichts andres … als … die Wahrheit und Gottheit des menschlichen Wesens (nothing other than the truth and godliness of the human essence)”. God in his view reflects human hopes and suffering, as does the belief in the immortality of the soul. He believed that religion was a lower stage of human self-understanding and that the time had come when it could be surpassed by rational philosophy. The Essence of Christianity explicitly rejected Hegel’s Idealism in favor of a materialistic philosophy. He argued that Hegel’s philosophy reached the highest development of Idealism and its end point. The English novelist George Eliot translated The Essence of Christianity into English and it had a great influence on critical studies of religion in the Anglo-Saxon world, as well.
Feuerbach argued that science was inherently democratic, because it allowed humanity to achieve a more complete and productive mastery of nature and because it was more worthy to a government to rule over educated, knowledgeable and free subjects than to rule over slaves. In his study of society, Feuerbach gave a strong emphasis to the me-you (Ich-Du) relationship and the interaction of the individual with society. He saw the essence of humanity in our social nature.
In writing on religion, Feuerbach made the provocative and somewhat eccentric argument that the Protestant Reformation actually represented the dissolving of the Christian religion, because in his view Lutheranism saw the essence of God in His relationship to humanity. He applied his more specific arguments about Christianity to religion in general, contending that all religion reflected humanity sense of dependence on the vagaries of external nature that is notably unsympathetic to the needs and the suffering of human being. In one of his late formulations not unlike the view of religion that Sigmund Freud would later adopt, he saw religion as a construction based on human wishes of the divine protection that we would like to have.
Tags: bruno bauer,, feuerbach
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