Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas

Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (1804-1872), German philosopher, who substituted religious psychology for orthodox religion and developed one of the first German materialistic philosophies. Born in Landshut and educated in Berlin and Erlangen, Feuerbach was a pupil of the eminent German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whose philosophical idealism he later rejected. In his chief work, The Essence of Christianity (1841; trans. 1854), Feuerbach stated that the existence of religion is justifiable only in that it satisfies a psychological need; a person's essential preoccupation is with the self, and the worship of God is actually worship of an idealized self.

More important than Feuerbach's religious psychology is his sensationalistic materialism. According to Feuerbach, people and their material needs should be the foundation of social and political thought. An individual and his or her mind, he held, are products of their environment; the whole consciousness of a person is the result of the interaction of sensory organs and the external world. At one point he asserted “der Mensch ist was er isst” (Man is what he eats), and advocated better food to improve humankind. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw in Feuerbach's emphasis on people and human needs a movement towards a materialistic interpretation of society, which they later formulated as the theory of historical materialism.