Ludwig Feuerbach's Concept of Alienation

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Feuerbach means that humans created God by defining all of the essentially redeeming aspects of God and projecting them outward onto a theoretical and analytical God-concept. The author relates Feuerbach's idea that theology, with its abstract study of the object of God, which is a projection of human attributes, was a type of anthropology. The paper stresses that, therefore, while Feuerbach properly defines theology as a misdirected anthropology, he also points out that the consequence of this misdirection is alienation.

From the Paper:

"Karl Marx, like Feuerbach, also was deeply influenced by Hegelian ideas of dialectic and the development of history toward a final stage. Similarly, he rejected Hegel's understanding of alienation, but unlike Feuerbach, Marx placed the locus of alienation not in any philosophical misunderstanding of religion, but in the actual hardships and difficulty that working people were forced to feel because of the working conditions that developed from market pressures. Here, Marx saw that the complaints of working people as being the actual source of their difficulties. Alienation did not occur because of their inability to properly understand the attributes of their own humanity, but because real social and economic forces kept them working at the best of a basically inhuman structure the market."

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