Principles of the Philosophy of the Future by Ludwig Feuerbach

Author:Ludwig Feuerbach [Feuerbach, Ludwig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

§ 24 Being & Thought

The identity of thinking and being which is the central point in the philosophy of identity is nothing other than a necessary consequence and unfolding of the concept of God as the being whose concept or essence contains existence. Speculative philosophy has only generalised and made into an attribute of thought or of the concept in general what theology made into an exclusive attribute of the concept of God. The identity of thinking and being is therefore only an expression for the divinity of reason – the expression thereof that thought or reason is the absolute being or the comprehensive unity of all truth and reality, that there is no antithesis of reason, that rather reason is everything just as, in strict theology, God is everything; that is, all that essentially and truly is. But a being that is not distinguished from thought, that is, a being that is only a predicate or determination of reason, or only a conceived and abstract being, is, in truth, no being at all. The identity of thinking and being expresses, therefore, only the identity of thought with itself. This means that absolute thought is unable to cleave itself from itself, that it cannot step out of itself to be able to reach being. Being remains something of the Beyond. Absolute philosophy has, to be sure, turned the other world of theology into the world of here and now for us, but for that matter it has turned the this-sidedness of the real world into an over-beyond.

The thought of speculative or absolute philosophy determines being distinct from itself as the activity of mediation, as that which is immediate, as that which is unmediated. For thought – at least for the thought which we are discussing – being is nothing more than this.

Thought posits being as counterposed to itself, but still within itself; it thereby immediately and without difficulty eliminates the opposition between being and itself; for being, as the antithesis of thought within thought, is nothing itself but thought. If being is nothing more than that which is unmediated, if unmediatedness alone constitutes its distinction from thought, how easy it is then to demonstrate that the determination of unmediatedness, namely, being, belongs to thought as well! If the essence of being is constituted by what is merely a determination of thought, how should being be distinguished from thought?

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