Feuerbachs theory of object-relations and its legacy in 20th

century post-Hegelian philosophy

Throughout his work, Feuerbach continued to wrestle with the core

problem of post-Kantian, idealist philosophy, namely, the question of how to

articulate the identity of subject and object. After embracing a thoroughly

orthodox Hegelian position on metaphysical and epistemological issues in his

early writings, he famously performed a radical theoretical turn in the late

1830s, having come to the conviction that any idealist answer, even one as

sophisticated as Hegels, would only lead to impasses. As a result of this

turn, Feuerbach embraced a naturalistic approach, as being the right path for

the philosophy of the future. Despite this shift, however, his thinking

remained deeply indebted to his formative Hegelian years. The challenge for

him was precisely to develop a realist and naturalistically grounded

metaphysics that would avoid the reduction of being to thinking, as he

thought Hegels idealism ultimately amounted to, without however returning

to a version of empiricism or dogmatic metaphysics predating Kant.

Furthermore, his attempts to develop a realist metaphysics and epistemology

consistently made use of formal conceptual schemes he had learnt in Hegels

logic. In a gesture typical of many post-Hegelian thinkers he thought that the

correct path for philosophy was to go beyond Hegel through the use of

Hegelian tools, to reject the system without forgetting the lessons of Hegels

1
sophisticated conceptual critiques of unilateral philosophical positions, and

without foregoing the analytical power of his logical armoury.

This paper seeks to show how Feuerbachs attempt to find a realist

alternative to the different versions of post-Kantian idealism, opened some

truly original theoretical paths. The paper does not seek to analyse or

evaluate the general metaphysical and epistemological frameworks devised

by Feuerbach in his writings following the Essence of Christianity. This work

has already been done extensively by previous interpreters, notably by Marx

Wartofsky in his masterful 1977 study. Rather, the paper focuses on

Feuerbachs sensualism and some of the conceptual tools he devised to

articulate it. Feuerbachs late naturalistic take on Hegels ontology, the paper

wants to show, was the great anticipation of a sensualist strand that

secretly announced some of the most original proposals in the post-Hegelian

legacy.1 The legacy of Feuerbachian insights into contemporary philosophy

has been duly noted (Kamenka, 1970; Schmidt, 1973). The paper will focus

on the way in which Feuerbachs sensualist approach led him to emphasise

the vulnerability of the subject as condition of access to objectivity, an

emphasis on the power of the human subject to be affected, making object-

dependence a fundamental condition of experience as well as a constitutive

feature of human subjectivity. We find in Feuerbach the first lineaments of a

philosophical theory of object-relations which anticipated, sometimes in

1
In this sense, this paper seeks to extend the argument already made by Paul Redding in
The Logic of Affect, by presenting Feuerbach as a key mediation in the trajectory from
German idealism to 20th century philosophical and psychological discussions of the
embodied sources of thought.

2
strikingly literal ways, some of the most significant post-Hegelian projects of

the following century. Indeed, the reference to post-Freudian psychoanalysis

that the term object-relation entails is deliberate: one of the central points

of the paper is precisely to show how Feuerbachs anticipation of the

intersubjective constitution of the individual was in fact premised on a more

fundamental object-related ontology.

In section 1, I argue that the ontology with which Feuerbach operates

in his mature writings is directly borrowed from Hegel, even if it is modelled

in a conceptual language that aims at a radical inversion of Hegels idealist

approach. It is what one might call a relational ontology, that is, one that

thinks of subjects as constituted in the interactions with other subjects

which thereby turn out to be their essential objects. Feuerbachs sensualist

take on Hegels relationism makes him go very far in asserting the object-

dependence of the subject, well beyond his well-known insights into the

intersubjective dependence of subjective formation. This explains why one

can find in his writings early traces of Adornos later theory of mimesis

(section 2). In section 3, I highlight the particular nature of Feuerbachs

theory of constitutive object-relations, namely as already pointing to the

affective, organic nature of intentionality, one that can be characterized as

libidinal. Here Feuerbachs theory of object-relation seems to be

announcing Merleau-Pontys late ontology of the flesh, to the extent that the

phenomenologist articulated this ontology in reference to Freuds core

concept of libido. Section 4 then proposes a model with which we might

3
reconstruct how object-relations and self-relations can be brought together

consistently. In this instance, Feuerbach uses key concepts that seem to

announce Freuds notion of primary narcissism. One contemporary

philosopher who has proposed a sophisticated model of subjectivity, in which

primary narcissism is shown to complement object-dependence, is Axel

Honneth. The last section argues that Feuerbachs full image of subjective

identity as reciprocal scaffolding of self- and object-relations foreshadows

Honneths core concept of positive self-relation.

By highlighting such disparate genealogical ties between Feuerbach

and these late descendants of Hegel,2 the paper seeks to bring to light an

insufficiently noted field in the landscape of contemporary philosophy, a field

that could be called post-Hegelian naturalism, or indeed, if the case for

Feuerbachs significance is accepted, post-Hegelian sensualism. I would like

to present Feuerbach as the first in a long line of contemporary philosophers

who tried to retain key aspects of Hegels conceptuality and methods, but

under the new auspices of a naturalistically minded philosophy, that is, a

philosophy whose starting assumption is that the achievements of spirit

are interlinked with, and indeed based upon, natural processes, that the

human mind and its symbolic capacities are intrinsically dependent upon

incarnation in physical environments.3 The ultimate goal of the paper is to

2
Another key modern thinker who would fit well in this field would be John Dewey.
3
Indeed, an interesting, related question is whether the possibility of defining a naturalistic
position as a legacy of Hegels idealism is in fact not already strongly foreshadowed by some
of Hegels own texts, or at least made possible by a specific interpretation of these texts.
See the special issue of Critical Horizons, Nature in Spirit: A New Direction for Hegel Studies

4
suggest the first contours of a theoretical terrain that might be called post-

Hegelian sensualism. Therefore when the paper talks about the

anticipations in Feuerbachs late writings of arguments and concepts

advanced by 20th century philosophers, the emphasis is purposely on the

overlaps rather than the differences, as these overlaps help to sketch the

contours of that shared theoretical terrain. My claim is that beyond the

differences between their respective thoughts, and indeed beyond the

differences in their interpretations of Hegel, these important modern thinkers

all used a concept of object-relation that owed a lot to Hegel, and Feuerbach

is a key figure that helps us to make sense of this.

1. Feuerbachs relational, sensualist ontology

Wartofsky has documented in great detail the inextricable difficulties in

which Feuerbach entangled himself, when in his writings following the

Essence of Christianity he asserted the identity of thinking and being, whilst

at the same time critiquing speculative idealism for its reduction of reality to

mere thought (see in particular Wartofksy, 365-386). On the one hand,

and Hegelian Philosophy, 13(2), 2012. The theory of subjective spirit in the Encyclopedia of
the Philosophical Sciences can be read as a naturalistic theory of the mind, as is attested in
the explicit point made by Hegel that everything is in sensation, and, if one wills,
everything that is in spiritual consciousness and in reason has its source and its origin in it
(# 400). This then constitutes a strong alternative to dominant non-metaphysical readings
of Hegel, which interpret Spirit strictly in discursive terms, as a set of reciprocal normative
commitments. For these interpretations the correct attitude towards naturalistic and
sensualist arguments is either one of rejection, when normativity is defined as a realm
radically separate from the natural (for instance Pippin, 2002), or of containment, when the
naturalness of normative beings is acknowledged, but the emphasis on normativity reduces
naturalness to mere finitude (Pinkard, 2013).

5
Feuerbachs sensualism derives from the constantly repeated affirmation of

the independence of being, nature and natural objects from thought, which

makes thought dependent upon sensation as the initial contact with

independent realities. On the other hand though, Feuerbach wanted his turn

to empiricism to be wholly different from pre-Kantian versions. Feuerbachs

turn to empiricism is the outcome of his constantly rehearsed critical

genealogy of modern philosophy, culminating in the denunciation of the

abstract nature of the different kinds of post-Kantian idealisms, most

especially Hegels. But, as Wartofsky convincingly argues, as his turn to

empiricism is the outcome of these long historico-conceptual reconstructions

and he continues to think of progress in philosophy in a Hegelian way, that

is, as an immanent progression from one deficient position to a more

integrated one, his thinking thereby remains bound to the problem-setting

and language of that very tradition his empiricism is supposed to correct. In

particular he continues to think that philosophys core problem is to properly

articulate the identity, or at least the unity, of thinking and being. This

appears very clearly for instance in a critical review published in 1841, the

same year as the Essence of Christianity. In it Feuerbach gives an overview

of the new empiricism he wishes to devise, as one that has to overcome the

abstractions of idealism, by beginning with the empirical, yet also has to

retain the lessons from Kant and his immediate descendants and therefore

does not revert to an obtuse empiricism, that is, an empiricism that is

unable or unwilling to raise itself to the level of philosophical thought (On

6
The Beginning of Philosophy, The Fiery Book, 137). The level of

philosophical thought denotes the sophistication of the conceptual

apparatuses developed by post-Kantian philosophers, notably Hegel, which

allowed them to categorically construct reality in all its complexity. An

empiricist approach then means that such a level of categorical

sophistication is to be retained, but can no longer be developed on the basis

of the transcendental egos self-determinations, but rather has to unfold on

the basis of real encounters with the real world.

Or, to quote another example, in the Preliminary Theses on the Reform

of Philosophy published in 1842 and anticipating much of what the more

famous Principles for the Philosophy of the Future will argue, Feuerbach

writes that the new and the only positive philosophy is the negation of all

scholastic philosophy, although it contains the truth of the latter (Fiery

Book, 169, my emphasis). This truth in question is the unity of being and

thinking. As always, Hegels philosophy constitutes both the ultimate

obstacle and greatest resource. His philosophy provides the resolution of

the contradiction between thinking and being as, in particular, expressed by

Kant. Its mistake though is that it is a resolution of the contradiction (that)

still remains within the contradiction; i.e. within one element thought. The

key therefore is to not give up on the attempt to think the unity of thinking

and being. However, this now has to be conducted for real, that is, in terms

of a real unity, one realized in real knowledge, the knowledge that begins

in sensation as real encounter with reality. This is what realism means for

7
Feuerbach: a real encounter with a really existing object on the basis of

which the real unity of thinking and being can be developed.

It may well be that this position only solves the problems by fiat, but

this is not our concern here. What matters for the purpose of this paper is

understanding what Feuerbach has in mind when he seeks to articulate a

realist conception of what his predecessors understood as the speculative of

identity of thinking and being, or of subject and object. Feuerbachs

assertoric (or dogmatic if one wills) assertion of metaphysical realism

explains why he sees no contradiction in asserting the independence of

being and yet in the same text can state that: Being, with which philosophy

begins, cannot be separated from consciousness any more than

consciousness can be separated from being being is the reality of

consciousness, but also equally consciousness the reality of being only

consciousness is real being. The real unity of spirit and nature is

consciousness alone (Fiery Book, 161-162).

In order to fully grasp the features of Feuerbachs conception of object-

relations, it is necessary to start from this realist conception of the unity of

subject and object. Feuerbachs attempt post-1839, to provide a realist

interpretation of subject-object identity is captured in formulations

interspersed throughout the Essence of Christianity and in subsequent

writings. The following two statements, at the start of his most famous book,

capture his intuition neatly:

8
 The object to which a subject essentially relates is nothing

else than this subjects own, but objective nature (Essence of

Christianity, 4).

And:

The object of any subject is nothing else than the subjects

own nature taken objectively (Essence, 13).

Before providing the critical, hermeneutic tools for Feuerbachs famous

theory of projection, statements like these articulate his attempt to give a

realist reformulation of the idealist principle of subject-object identity.

Feuerbach interprets Hegels conception of speculative identity as being

grounded in the transcendental unity of apperception, with Hegel taking the

extra step of radicalizing the scope of the Is constitutive powers so that

there is no longer any chasm between things as they are and as they are

thought in transcendental consciousness.4 The ontological dimension of the

link between thinking and being, on this reading of Hegel, stems from the

overlap that obtains when the determinations of being are said to be fully

accounted for by the categories of thinking. By contrast, in Feuerbachs

4
For an explicit Hegelian reference supporting such a reading, see for instance the following
passage of the Science of Logic: the comprehension of an object consists in nothing else
than that the ego makes it its own, pervades it and brings it into its own form, that is, into
the universality that is immediately as determinateness, or a determinateness that is
immediately universality it is only as it is in thought that the object is truly in and for
itself (585).

9
realist translation the link between subject and object is real and as such

foundational, independent at first of the logical.

The ontological implication of this realist take is well captured in the

two quotes above: if a being requires that it relates to certain objects to be

what it is, then those objects in fact express the essence, or nature of the

subject itself, since the subject could not be, nor be what it is, without them.

But this time the revelation of the subject in its object is a real, empirical

one. It is no longer an experience of consciousness, as in the

Phenomenology of Spirit, that is, an experience in which the transcendental

self discovers itself in the structures of objectivity. Rather, the discovery of

the subject in its objects is the outcome of experience in the everyday and

the scientific senses of the term, no longer in the transcendantal sense. This

solution is highly effective in its basic impetus, it simply reasserts the

primary foundational place of reality in experience and thought. The whole

difficulty is to see how this insight is to be fleshed out in a way that is not

simply a return to pre-Kantian empiricism, something a keen student of

Hegel like Feuerbach did not want to accommodate, as we saw earlier.

However, as said, it is not the detail of Feuerbachs varied attempts at this

fleshing out that this paper is interested in, but rather some of the main

implications of his realist shift.

By essence, Feuerbach understands the features that enable a type

of being (a species) to sustain itself in its existence, the conditions of its

being. For organic beings, essence denotes more specifically the internal and

10
external biological (natural) conditions required for that beings

reproduction. This means that for Feuerbach (just as for Hegel), the identity

of subject and object is not inert, but dynamic. The subject becomes what

it has to be according to its essence by relating dynamically to its essential

objects. A subject should not be posited as an autarkic being, as a

substance, existing in and of itself prior to its qualification in its predicates

or independent of interactions with other substances. Rather, it is the ever

changing web of inter-relations that bind this being to other beings and allow

for its essence to unfold that in fact defines it in its essence, and in the

process also defines its essential objects.5 Feuerbachs ontology is a

relational one, just as Hegels (see Theunissen, Sein und Schein; Habermas,

From Kant to Hegel and back Again, for classical renderings of an Hegelian

relational ontology).

Such a relational, dynamic take on subject-object identity forms the

conceptual core of Feuerbachs famous theory of religious projection. If we

can read human beings Gattungswesen in the projective products of their

imagination, it is because, as for all beings, human beings obey the

fundamental metaphysical rule according to which what the subject is lies

only in the predicate (Essence 19), and the essential objects of a subject are

a subjects nature objectified. Typically though, projection is one of those

5
See a clear delineation of this interactionist scheme in the first pages of Essence,
particularly at 5. The 1830 Erlangen lectures on Logic and Metaphysics are particularly
enlightening in this respect as well. In these lectures, Feuerbach not only provided a free
commentary on but also began the appropriation for his own thinking of Hegels logic. His
commentary on the sections dedicated to the category of interaction (Wechselwirkung) at
the end of the Wesen section, in which Hegels interactionist ontology is most clearly
developed, show his deep understanding of the scheme, see Vorlesungen ber Logik und
Metaphysik, Gesammelte Werke 14, 282-287.

11
dynamic processes in which a subject defines itself for itself and for us

through interactions with its essential objects.

Feuerbach borrows the ontological relationism learnt in Hegel and

seeks to translate it in a realist, naturalistic sense. For Feuerbach, the

outcome of such a transformation is sensualism. Feuerbachs sensualism

encompasses many dimensions, some of which have made him famous in

the history of ideas, for instance his aesthetic and hedonistic grounding of

humanism (Bishop, 2009).6 Initially, however, his sensualism comprises a

metaphysical stance, the only possible way he sees of developing a

relational, interactionist ontology that does not suffer what are for him the

defects of an idealistic starting point, namely the reduction of natural

realities to categories of spirit.

Formally, the relational scheme remains the same, namely the view

that subjects define themselves through dynamic relations to essential

objects, such that what a subject is cannot be discovered by insight into an

independent substance, but rather is to be found in the predicates that

appear as a result of the interactions with the objects; the subject is to be

found in its essential objects. But the realist perspective leads to an entirely

different way of cashing out this formal ontological scheme. This becomes

particularly clear in terms of the epistemological implications of Feuerbachs

sensualism. The realist assumption means that we need to assert the

epistemic and ontological primacy of sensuous encounters with real objects,

6
See Paul Bishop, Eudaimonism, Hedonism and Feuerbachs Philosophy of the Future,
Intellectual History Review 19(1), 2009, 65-81.

12
which are thus met in their flesh, that is, in terms of their qualitative

features, inasmuch as the latter leave their mark upon the subject.7 These

sensed encounters with essential objects open up the ground upon which

theoretical and practical interactions take place, they form the primordial

condition of experience and knowledge, ahead of any conceptual process.8

On the side of the subject, embodied anchoring in the world, being-

there (Dasein) in the flesh (Principles, 61), is therefore the first condition of

knowledge and practice. It is as individuals that human beings engage in

cognition and practice, and, as Feuerbach constantly insists, individuals are

individualized through their body: The body is the basis, the subject of

personality (Essence, 91). On the object side, world disclosure is

primordially sensuous, grounded in perception and sensation: only thought

that is broadened and opened by perception is true thought corresponding to

the essence of reality (Principles, 65).9 But sensation does not just secure

the grounding of world-attachment, which in turn allows for the givenness of

objects. Sensation for the late Feuerbach is a real, dispositional property in a

relational structure that binds together in one indivisible unity a human need

and its fulfillment in an object. The examples he uses to illustrate this unity

are those or breathing or seeing (see Wartowsky, 380-386). As he writes in

7
My reading is therefore proposes an alternative interpretation to Manfred Franks argument
(in Mangel an Sein) that Feuerbachs emphasis on the immediate moment of sensuous
encounter rehearses early romantic, and Schellingian worries about the spinning in the
void entailed in Kants and Hegels idealisms.
8
As he writes: human feelings have no empirical or anthropological significance in the
sense of the old transcendent philosophy; they have ontological and metaphysical
significance (Principles, 53).
9
Or in a similar formulation: only out of the negation of thought, out of being determined by
the object, out of passion, out of the source of all pleasure and need is born true, objective
thought, and true, objective philosophy (Theses in Fiery Book, 164).

13
the already cited 1841 review, Seeing is nothing but the sensation of being

affected by light; the eye is the light sense. Seeing without light is as much

as breathing without air; to see is to partake in light (Fiery Book, 143).

In his late writings, Feuerbach thus seeks to devise an incarnation-

model of sensation, in which sensation is both an ontological and an

epistemic marker of objective reality. This is the basis for Feuerbachs

puzzling claim, that truth, reality and sensibility are identical (Principles,

51). Truth can only be truth about real processes which need to be accessed

for real, that is through incarnation, before any further cognitive processing

can take place. In sensation, the reality and the truth-content of objective

processes are opened up for real. Sensation is supposed to be the point at

which a real qualitative feature of the world and a real affection of the

human beings sensibility coincide in one real moment. In this affective

moment, an event occurs that has both ontological and epistemic validity:

something about the world is revealed and is revealed to human knowledge;

this is why feeling alone is real knowledge (Essence, 228). In his later

philosophy, Feuerbach thus seeks to construct the identity of subject and

object in a realist sense that is wholly literal, namely as realized, both made

real and accessible to knowledge, in sensation.

Rational knowledge on this model is a process of extracting and

generalising on the basis of the revelation of the properties of objects implicit

in sensation. The fact that the human individual is a species being, that is,

has the capacity as an individual to relate to the species as a whole,

14
accounts for the mediation between individual experience and the

universality it harbours. Feuerbach thinks that sensation holds within itself

the universal meaning that a scientific analysis aims to achieve. The classical

distinction of the human species from other animal species on account of the

capacity to think is in fact grounded in the specificity of human perception,

the fact that individual sensation feels its finitude and can relate to the

universality of human sensation as a whole (Principles, 69-70). In the

immediate moment of individual sensation, the universality and truth of

objective relations is hidden, waiting to be unpacked and explicated by the

process of rational inquiry.10

2. Object-relations

Feuerbachs strategy to meet the realist challenge is thus to embrace a

radical solution, which provides a straightforward answer, even if it is one

also fraught with tremendous philosophical difficulties as soon as one

attempts to work out its full implications: we have access to reality thanks to

moments of fusion achieved in sensation, in which objects affect us in ways

that make the divide between subject and object temporarily void. Whereas

in his Hegelian years, Feuerbach sought the abolition of the divide in the

universality of thinking, after his naturalistic shift he looks for it in the

10
An important source for Feuerbachs sensualist metaphysics might well have been ancient
naturalism, notably Epicurean epistemology, which already entailed a thoroughly realist
account of sensation. See Feuerbachs well-informed account of this early form of realist
sensualism in his Erlangen lectures on the history of logic, Gesammelte Werke 13, 289-296.

15
capacity of the human being to open up to the objective features of the

world when the objects affect us directly.11 Object-relations (and no longer

the formal logical structures of the mind) in this sense become primordial

and constitutive.

A fascinating aspect of Feuerbachs writings is that the emphasis he places

on object-dependence is one that he explicitly connects with an insight into

the deep-psychological sense of object-relations. Feuerbachs philosophical

theory of object-relations is also already a psychological one.

This second sense in which the notion of object-relations can be

understood is the one that has been well identified already (Honneth and

Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 12-18). Feuerbach is the direct

forerunner of strong versions of 20th century intersubjectivism, that is, of

conceptions emphasizing the predominance of the relationship to significant

others in the formation and structuring of subjective identity. In Feuerbach

already, well before object-relations psychology emerged in post-Freudian

psychoanalysis, the significant other is the constitutive pole in the formation

of the selfs psychic structure. The passages on the I-Thou relation in the

mature writings are well known. We can also refer to the early Thoughts on

Death and Immortality, typical of the writings of the 1830s, in which

Feuerbach already argues in terms of psychic development, going back to

the earliest time of your life, and arguing that, given our utter dependence

upon others for the emergence of a sense of self in those early years, others
11
To be embodied is to be in the world; it means to have so many senses, i.e.so many pores
and so many naked surfaces. The body is the porous ego (On The Beginning of
Philosophy, Fiery Book, 143).

16
are entwined and woven into your inmost life, into the unity of the

consciousness of your own particular personhood, to such an extent that

your knowledge of yourself is mediated by others knowledge of you

(Thoughts, 115-116). This neatly encapsulates, in everyday language, the

core idea of psychological theories object-relations. Furthermore, well before

the philosophers of the intersubjectivistic tradition, the other is the

criterion of epistemic validity and the reference point in normative

evaluation, as the following passage nicely illustrates:

The consciousness of the moral law, of right, of propriety,

of truth itself, is indissolubly united with my consciousness of

another than myself. That is true in which another agrees with

me agreement is the first criterion of truththe agreement of

others is therefore my criterion of the normalness, the

universality, the truth of my thoughts. (Essence, 158)

However, Feuerbach interprets these intersubjectivistic insights

through the prism of the idealist language he still speaks even after his

naturalistic turn, that is, with the categories of subject and object. As a

result, the intersubjective constitution of the subject is articulated in the

following terms: the subject develops as subject through its interaction with

other subjects, and this in turn means that the subject becomes subject by

being placed in the position of an object of those subjects. When these two

17
categories are used in sufficiently abstract ways however, the psychological

and the metaphysical perspectives merge. Feuerbach can interpret

intersubjective dependency, which addresses developmental and normative

issues, within the framework of his more fundamental metaphysical

emphasis on the object-moment in ontology and epistemology. This merging

of the psychological and the metaphysical, or the genetic and the structural

is particularly striking in the following key passage:

The notion of the object is originally nothing other than the

notion of another I; thus, man in his childhood comprehends all

things as freely active and arbitrary beings; therefore the notion

of the object is generally mediated by the notion of the thou, of

the objectified I. An object, that is, another I, is given not to

the I, but to the not-I in me; for only where I am transformed

from an I into a thou, where I am passive, does the

conception of an activity existing apart from me, that is,

objectivity arise. But only through the senses is an I a not-I

Only sensuous beings affect one another. I am an I for myself

and simultaneously a thou for others. This I am, however, only

as a sensuous being (Principles, 51).

The most obvious way to read this passage is to see in it a rehearsal of the

genetic and structural intersubjectivism already at play in Feuerbach. It

18
seems to anticipate Habermas discussion of ontogenesis in which first- and

third-person perspectives (I- and object-perspective) are buttressed and

conditioned by the acquisition of deictics and personal pronouns which are

acquired through dialogical interactions (Habermas, Individuation through

Socialisation); or Honneths thesis according to which access to objective

realities is conditioned and mediated by the constitutive relations to a

significant other in which one has invested affectively, such that one learns

to look at the world through the eyes of an other (Reification).

But the passage in fact says more. It develops a more complex account of

the relationship between inter-subjectivity and object-relations, precisely

because it seeks to construct intersubjectivity through the conceptual

apparatus of the subject-object categorical framework. The passage does not

just say that the I develops the concept of object through being addressed by

other Is, thereby becoming an object to them as Thou. Objectivity is

defined more broadly as separation from and opposition to the I, as activity

that opposes self-activity, activity existing apart from me and opposing

me.12 Consciousness of the world is humiliating in that first ontological

sense. Given this definition of objectivity, the object as active resistance to

my own activity is therefore itself somehow another subject, in a basic

ontological sense. Feuerbach clearly refers to the Fichtean explication of the

transcendental ego in the first versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. In these

texts Fichte famously deduced the fact that the self has to posit a not-self in
12
A real object is given to me only where a being that affects me is given to me and where
my self-activity finds its boundary or resistance in the activity of another being.
(Principles, 51).

19
order to be itself an epistemic, or representing (vorstellend) self. The

shock (Anstoss) of this not-self offering a resistance (Gegenstreben) to the

spontaneity of the self is accessed through sensation, Gefhl. But

Feuerbachs sensualist approach can be read as a significant departure from

the Fichtean scheme, or as another key move in the process of

detranscendantalisation, to borrow Habermas phrase (Habermas, 2003).

Whereas in Fichte the not-I is posited by the absolute I as opposing and

limiting the representing I, thus reaffirming the priority of self-consciousness

even as its dependency on a shock from outside is acknowledged, for

Feuerbach the object-pole is not simply one condition of subjectivity: to be a

self, the self has to turn into an object of the object, which in this sense

functions as a self and thereby as the primary pole. The strong dependency

thesis in Feuerbach, which echoes the different versions of intersubjectivism

in post-Kantian philosophy, the view that the self is constituted genetically

and structurally in dependence on otherness, this thesis now means that it is

not the I that posits the not-I but the not-I that makes the I into a not-I, and

can do so only by itself acting as a kind of I. This, the text tells us, is the

basic ontological meaning of affection. It is being affected in the simple

sense that one has ones activity obstructed so that the activity thereby

revealed reveals itself as that of a subject and simultaneously provides us

with the category of the object, as that which opposes the subject.

Abiding by what Feuerbach had learnt in Hegels logic, the terms subject-

object are interchangeable in the overall picture of the unity that thereby

20
emerges. The objects that manifest themselves as objects by opposing my

activity, on the one hand act as subjects which transform me into objects,

but equally reveal my own activity to myself as that which was opposed by

them and thus teach me that I am a subject. I can only know there are

external objects, I acquire the ontology or grammar of objecthood, because I

learn objecthood in me through experiencing objects as subjects. And I

experience these objects as subjects because I experience myself as subject

through having had my subject activity objected to by these objects, and so

on and so forth.13

The circularity that is thereby established in the acquisition of the subject

and object categories is highly original in the context of post-Kantian German

philosophy and, I would now like to suggest, has a rich philosophical lineage

in the subsequent century. It defines a first, basic ontological meaning of

affectivity, as capacity to be affected by the other, where affection first

means havings ones activity obstructed, opposed, objected to. The

passage has a clear genetic import:

thus, man in his childhood comprehends all things as freely

active and arbitrary beings; therefore the notion of the object is

13
A passage in the already cited 1841 review captures the argument neatly: Is an object
nothing else beside being an object? Certainly, it is the other of the ego. But can I not turn
this around and say that it is the ego that is the other, i.e. the object of the object, and that,
consequently, the object is also an ego? What enables the ego to posit the other? Only the
fact that the ego is the same in relation to the object what the object is in relation to the
ego (Fiery Book, 139).

21
 generally mediated by the notion of the thou, of the objectified

I.

Feuerbach already propounds the classical thesis, that the child initially

treats all other objects as subjects, and only gradually learns to make

ontological distinctions between inorganic, organic, animal and human

entities. However, given the very general notion of objecthood used in the

passage, such sensuous dependence upon others for my sense of self

applies not just to other human subjects-objects, but to material, inorganic

objects as well. Feuerbach already anticipates a key idea developed in the

following century, namely that subjective formation occurs not just through

interaction with other selves like me, but also as a result of the qualitative

encounters within the environment and in particular with the qualitative

features of the world of inanimate objects. Feuerbachs sensuous take on the

not-I already seems to anticipate Adornos theory of mimesis. In Adorno

also, the capacity to imitate external objects is explained via the

mechanisms of human sensibility, as a capacity to be affected by objects

through which the two-fold process of the constitution of external objecthood

and of subjective identity are co-created.

From the traces the thing leaves behind in its senses the

subject recreates the world outside it: the unity of the thing in its

manifold properties and states; and in so doing, in learning how

22
 to impart a synthetic unity not only to the outward impressions,

but to the inward ones which gradually separate themselves

from them, it retroactively constitutes the self (Dialectic, 155).

Probably unaware that he cites Feuerbach almost literally, Adorno himself

continues to use the Fichtean language of the not-I to make sense of this: it

is only to the extent that the I is also not-I that it can also relate to the not-I,

can do something, and indeed only that extent that thinking is also doing

(Negative Dialektik, 201).

Indeed, Adorno strikingly quotes ancient sources to retrace his concept of

mimesis, the very same sources that Feuerbach himself also referred to as

an early inspiration for his later sensualism:

Parmenides had already taught that what is perceived and what perceives

resemble each other the resemblance between subject and object is the

condition for the possibility of knowledge.14

For later intersubjectivists, these types of analyses are faulty because they

remain caught up in the outdated language of subject-object. In short,

intersubjectivism is supposed to move to another basic paradigm. These

objections fail to consider the possibility that inter-subject relations and

14
In Against Epistemology, 143. See also Negative Dialectic: without affinity with nature
there is no truth: this is what idealism caricatured in the philosophy of identity.
Consciousness knows of its other as much as it resembles it. See also a good summary in
the long footnote to the lectures on Kants Critique of Pure Reason (275-276), as well as in
Lectures on Negative Dialectics (248-249). Compare with Dissertatio, 43/note 29, 139, where
Feuerbach also quotes Aristotles rendering of the old argument that knowledge has to be
based on the similarity of subject and object.

23
subject-object relations are not exclusive but can be complimentary. Against

Honneths archetypal intersubjectivistic reading of Adorno in his Reification

lectures, in which object-relations are said to be dependent upon and

mediated by relations to other selves, Feuerbach already provides the

argument according to which relations to the world as a whole, inasmuch as

it has qualitative, sensuous impact, also has a psychologically constitutive

effect, so that even inanimate objects play a role in ontogenesis.

This thought was developed most eminently by another great post-Hegelian

of the 20th century, namely G.H. Mead in his late theory of perception, in the

texts published as Philosophy of the Act (see especially Joas, G.H. Mead, 145-

166). In these texts, Meads seeks to show that the spatial-temporal identity

of objects of perception is not only constructed by utilizing the capacity to

take the view point of another, the capacity for role-taking learnt in social

interaction, but also, reciprocally, that human subjects achieve a sense of

proprioceptive unity and identity by having it reflected back to them through

the experience of the spatial-temporal unity and identity of objects of

experience that confront their motions and actions. Contact experience is

primary in that sense. It provides what we might call in Feuerbachian

language the sensuous anchoring point upon which other senses can build

up. In particular, other senses for Mead are anticipations of a contact-to-

come driven by the imperatives of natural survival. Meads theory of

perception gives a prime example of a sensualist epistemology that is not

contemplative, as the charge is classically made against Feuerbach, 15 but

15
Most famously by Marx, for instance in the Theses on Feuerbach.

24
is linked to a pragmatist approach, which considers the subject as an

organism interacting with essential objects in its environment. In turn Meads

pragmatist conception of perception as perception of things that can be

grasped as means to possible ends also shows a way in which perception

and thought are continuous, just as in Feuerbachs (admittedly largely

underdeveloped) theory.16

When the subject projects herself physically, or merely visually or auditorily,

towards objects to be grasped, the experience of resistance thereby evoked

in herself, through the role-taking capacity, can be understood as the

reaction of these objects to her capture. The key point here is not that

intersubjectivity is functionally required to explain the perception of self-

identical, permanent objects in space. Rather, it is that, just as in Feuerbach,

this intersubjective constitution of perception also relies upon the circle of

subject-object, action/reaction, activity/passivity. Already in Feuerbach, the

identity of the self and the physical unity of the objects are formed in

tandem, reciprocally scaffold each other, through sensuous encounters with

a world that is experienced first and foremost as different from me and

opposing me. As Mead said, in a passage that can be read as giving more

precise content to a core Feuerbachian insight: It is the attitude of pressure

appearing as an inside of the object and as the reaction to this object that

constitutes the possibility of there being objects and physical selves over

against the objects, and which constitutes the necessity of their reciprocal

character (Philosophy of the Act, 442).

16
See in particular Mead, Concerning Animal Perception.

25
 3. Libidinal attachments

Affectivity, the capacity to be affected by essential objects is sensuous

also in the sense in which it expresses itself, for the kind of medium or

relationality it is. Sensuousness emphasises not just the embodied aspect of

relations to essential objects, the fact that they involve feeling before

rational capacities, but equally the fact that they involve the feelings of

pleasure and pain. In the end, the concept of essential attachment that

underpins Feuerbachs relational ontology is the concept of attachments

fuelled by an intentional force that is just as organic as it is psychological.

The notion of libido captures this idea of an equally active, intentional, and

passive, affective attachment as it is entailed in Feuerbachs conception of

essential relation. His ubiquitous and multilayered concept of love I now want

to argue is the metaphorical name for this idea.

Feuerbachs concept of love denotes first of all the special attachment

uniting members of the same species. It is defined in many passages as the

realization of the unity of the species through the medium of a moral

sentiment (Essence, 266). This sensuous grounding of the link to the

species as a whole is not just important for Feuerbachs brand of humanism.

This feeling also has an important epistemological valence since thinking

correctly is for Feuerbach thinking according to the species, and the link to

26
others of the same species is grounded firstly in love, not in language or

any other symbolic form. As he writes already in his Hegelian years, when

you love, not self but essence is object and content of your feeling

(Thoughts, 28).

The concept of love as affective inter-human link covers both erotic

love amongst adults and the primordial love of the child to the mother. In

fact, however, some key passages show that his concept of love is much

more general and really designates any constitutive essential relation, any

relation to an essential object. Just as Feuerbachs relational ontology

stretches beyond inter-subjectivity to include the realm of objecthood in

general, his concept of libidinal attachment applies to all objects, not just

human objects/subjects.

A key passage in which this comes to light is section 33 of the

Principles of the Philosophy of the Future:

Only in feeling and in love does this as in this person or

this object, that is, the particular have absolute value Only

that exists which is an object be it real or possible of passion.

Abstract thought that is without feeling and without passion

cancels the difference between being and nonbeing, but this

difference is a reality for love. As being in distinction from

nonbeing is given to me only through love and feeling generally,

27
 so is also an object in distinction from me given to me only

through love (Principles, 52-53, emphasis mine).

For Feuerbach the proof of existence lies only in the moment where an

object directly affects me, that is, in the sensuous moment produced by an

obstacle to my activity. This moment, as we saw, has both ontological and

epistemic significance. This passage adds the crucial dimension of

intentionality, as that which underpins attachment to essential objects.

Essential objects are not met randomly, they are sought out to sustain the

life and the essence of the species, or of the individual inasmuch as it is a

species being. Feuerbachs relational ontology is an erotic one, in the very

general sense the term can take in Freuds metapsychology, notably as it is

reread by philosophers like Marcuse, where it designates the human beings

impulse to sustain and increase its being. Rather than sensation in general, it

is in love understood as an ontological and basic epistemological concept,

that ontology and knowledge are grounded, the Hegelian identity of thinking

and being realised.

Feuerbach expressed very early on the idea that love is the

fundamental basis for a sensualist, realist philosophy, for instance in the

Thoughts on Death: it is unique to love that feeling and knowing are not

separate from being (28). Or as he puts it, love is distinguished from all

28
other experiences by the fact that it is all experiences (Thoughts, 28, my

emphasis).17

This general, metaphysical concept of love designates the capacity

for active attachment, but is grounded in the more primordial capacity to be

passively affected by an other, what Feuerbach terms passibilitiy, or the

capacity to suffer (Leidensfhigkeit). The figure of Christ is the master

metaphor of this capacity:

the Passion of Christ represents not only moral, voluntary

suffering, the suffering of love, the power of sacrificing self for

the good of others; it represents also suffering as such, suffering

in so far as it is an expression of passibility in general (Essence,

60, my emphasis).

Feuerbach explicitly highlights this ambivalence of affectivity as

simultaneously active and passive: the heart has a passive, receptive

relation to what it produces (Essence, 59). At an initial level of analysis, the

object plays the active part in affecting the subject, since, as we saw: A real

object is given to me only where a being that affects me is given to me and

where my self-activity finds its boundary or resistance in the activity of

another being. (Principles 51). But affectivity in the strong metaphysical

17
See also the young lecturers analyses in his 1830 lectures in Erlangen, at the peak of
Feuerbachs orthodox Hegelianism, where love is already presented as an infinite drive
that contains already the features of rational thought inasmuch as it achieves the real unity
of subject and object, Gesammelte Werke 13, 76-82.

29
sense also means that the self invests in the bond linking it to the object,

because the object helps sustain the nature of the subject in some way.

The subject is affected by objects it needs and objects it desires. Erotic

yearning is the paradigm of affectivity in this sense, but is only one example

of love.

The absence of the essential object leads to a negative feeling, to

suffering in the sense of pain, not just suffering as affection. Presence of the

essential object means pleasure: that object whose being affords you

pleasure and whose nonbeing affords you pain that alone exists

(Principles, 53)

These libidinal dimensions of essential attachments were delineated

in strikingly similar terms by the philosophers who drew conceptual elements

from Freuds metapsychology. For instance, they are present in Adornos

concept of mimesis, notably as the latter is realized in aesthetic experience:

Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness.

That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being

subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic

comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than

subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to

objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge

(Aesthetic Theory, 331).

30
 But the libidinal conception of essential attachments finds an even

stronger echo in Merleau-Pontys own relational ontology, notably in its latest

stages. In the Phenomenology of Perception, the sexual economy of the

psyche is interpreted as framing and fuelling the holistic bodily schema

through which the world is accessed (Phenomenology of Perception, 160-

174), so much so that in the end, sexuality is coextensive with (human) life

(172). We might say that Merleau-Ponty is the modern philosopher who most

emphasized the metaphysical value of the libido, as the primary condition of

experience.

In Merleau-Pontys later lectures on nature, which represent the

naturalistic counterpart to the ontological meditations published under the

title of The Visible and the Invisible, the libidinal dimension of essential

attachments is developed even more explicitly. Just like Feuerbach post-

1839, Merleau-Pontys core philosophical intention can be characterised as

an attempt to naturalise dialectic. This motto captures the impetus of his

thought from his very first work, The Structure of Behaviour, all the way to

his last writings. Naturalising dialectic for Merleau-Ponty means first of all

accounting for complex structural phenomena, like physical mechanisms,

organic processes and indeed human life forms, in ways that respect the

unity and wholesomeness of the structural relations, in other words, without

positing the relata as prior to or independent of, their relations. In his early

work, this is done mostly in reference to Gestalt theory, but one should not

forget that Freudian metapsychology and historical materialism also provide

31
key references. With these theoretical reference points, Merleau-Ponty seeks

to develop an immanentist ontology in which the relations (structures)

explain the meaning and function of the relata, but in such a way that these

structures do not exist independently of the relata, but rather emerge from

them. Perception is the paradigmatic example of such a structuralist,

relational ontology: it requires a mode of explanation that takes into account

the overall constitution of the body as perceptual medium, the preexisting

structure of the field in which objects are perceived, and the ways in which

internal and external field both preexist each other and yet in some sense

co-constitute each other. Furthermore, and again just as in Feuerbach, such

emergentist relational ontology supports a second fundamental aim, namely

to erase the ontological gap between the visible and the invisible, or

between the symbolic and the material, or to use the old terminology,

between being and thinking. This aim is to be pursued in naturalistic ways,

by reconstructing philosophically contemporary developments in biology, to

show the emergence of symbolicity and expressivity at the very heart of

organic processes. For instance, animal communication can be shown to be

more than just response to stimulus, and to present the traits of symbolic

interaction, so much so that there is a form of culture amongst animals

(Nature, 258).

In such immanentist, emergentist ontology, the body of the human

being has a special place, just as it does in Feuerbach. The flesh of the

human body, because of its specific affective organization and because it has

32
as its double the power of language and thought, reveals the flesh of the

world:

the flesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the

world; the human body is symbolism, not in the superficial

sense of: a term representing another term, being there for

another term, but in the fundamental sense of: expressive for

another term (Nature, 281).

The human body is thus the point at which being and thinking

come together because the human body is the medium of sensibility

(Empfindbarkeit says Merleau-Ponty, quoting Husserl), and the point in which

are anchored the symbolic powers necessary to represent the felt world to

open it up to logical analysis (in Hegels sense of the term).

This sensibility is in Merleau-Ponty also mimetic and libidinal. The

power of the human body schema to symbolize and express the structures of

the world, to be the worlds gold-standard (chose-talon) is rooted in its

capacity to be fully open to objects. This means, first of all, that it is capable

of replicating external structures within its own structures, mimetically

Adorno would have said. The human body schema achieves in perception a

replicate of the external structures it perceives (Nature, 280). This power is

made possible by the specificity of human sexuality, namely the capacity for

libidinal intentionality, underpinning object-attachment. The doubling up of

33
world structures in the body schema must be thought on the model of

introjection and projection, as the libidinal dimension of the body schema

(Nature, 281). Merleau-Ponty here refers directly to Freuds thesis about the

necessity for the human being to move from primary narcissism to object-

attachment:

the body requires something other than the body-as-thing

or just self-relations. It is caught up in a circuit with the others

Freuds Eros and Thanatos retrieve our own problem of the flesh

in its twofold meaning as opening and narcissism, mediation and

self-centrededness. With introjection-projection mechanisms

Freud already saw the relation of Ineinander between self and

world, self and nature, self and animality, self and social life

(Nature, 288).

Merleau-Ponty interprets Freud in a philosophical way, as providing an

account through his metapsychology, of the different positions onto the

world from which the world can be disclosed. The different stages in the

development of sexuality trace the different, increasingly layered ways in

which the human body, imbued each time with specific powers of

symbolization, can make itself the point of passage between endogenous

demands and object-relations: from a mother-world in the symbiotic phase in

which the subject is still almost entirely swallowed; to a sadistic, anal

34
organization in which object-relation is destructive, to a phallic

organization, and so on. Sexuality as it is conceptualized by Freud, that is, in

terms of an organically rooted energy translated into psychic forces,

represents for Merleau-Ponty the embodied intentional force that underpins

all life-processes of the human being, including its most intellectual or

symbolic ones:

the sexual is coextensive with the whole human being, not as a unique

causality, but as a dimension outside of which there is nothing left (Nature,

351).

Merleau-Ponty and Feuerbach share this combined emphasis on the

sexual dimension of sensuousness together with the broadening of the

scope, from objects understood merely as internalized (human) others, as in

psychoanalysis, to objects in general. This strong overlap justifies in my view

the claim that Merleau-Pontys naturalistic characterization of his ontology of

the flesh can be read as a late development, on a similar post-Hegelian

basis, of some of Feuerbachs core insights.

4. Self-love

For these kinds of naturalistic attempts to reframe transcendental

consciousness and intentionality in terms of essential attachments, a specific

35
issue arises, namely the nature of the relationship between object-relation

and self-relation, or more specifically, between self-love and love of the

object. Here again, Feuerbach can be seen to outline some key intuitions that

are further developed in the 20th century in the wake of classical German

philosophy, and more specifically Hegel.

As a direct forerunner of the tradition of thought that has defended the

primacy of intersubjectivity, Feuerbach appears in many texts to make self-

relation dependent upon object-relations, at least in the psychological sense

of that term. This is the case apparently in the following key passage:

the consciousness of the world is a humiliating

consciousness but the first stone against which the pride of

egoism stumbles is the thou, the alter ego. The ego first steels its

glance in the eye of a thou before it endures the contemplation

of a being which does not reflect its own image. My fellow-man is

the bond between me and the world. I am, and I feel myself,

dependent on the world, because I first feel myself dependent on

other men. If I did not need man, I should not need the world. I

reconcile myself with the world only through my fellow-man.

Without other men the world would be for me not only dead and

empty but meaningless. Only through his fellow does man

become clear to himself and self-conscious; but only when I am

clear to myself does the world become clear to me The ego,

36
 then, attains to consciousness of the world through

consciousness of the thou (Essence, 83).

This passage however also begins with a reference to self-relation, and

indeed appears to place the latter as the primary form of relation: the

consciousness of the world is a humiliating consciousness but the first

stone against which the pride of egoism stumbles is the thou, the alter ego

(my emphasis). In this quote, Feuerbach seems to posit a primary form of

self-consciousness which suffers what might be called narcissistic injuries

when it bumps up against the world, and even more essentially, as we can

surmise on the basis of all we know about Feuerbachs insistence on

interpersonal relations, when it relates to other beings like itself. There

seems to be a hesitation then about the primacy of constitutive relations.

From the perspective of the critics of intersubjectivism, Feuerbach seems to

be committing the same fallacy that post-Hegelians like Habermas and

Honneth repeated, as Dieter Henrich and his students famously tried to show

(see Freundlieb, 2000, for a good survey of the key protagonists and their

arguments). If the ego is said to become clear to himself and self-conscious

only through the other, hasnt the ego thereby already been acquainted with

itself in the first place? Doesnt Feuerbach therefore also imply something

like an affinity of the self with itself, as the genetic and structural condition

for the circle of self-relation and object-relation?

37
 I think, however, that it is possible to bring together self-love and

object-love, in a way that would make sense in a Hegelian or post-Hegelian

framework. In the following passage of the Essence of Christianity,

Feuerbach explicitly mentions self-love:

that which exists necessarily has a pleasure, a love in

itself, loves itself and loves itself justly... To exist is to assert

oneself, to affirm oneself, to love oneself (Essence, 63).

How does this self-love and love of others relate to each other? Given

Feuerbachs insistence on intersubjectivity as condition of self-consciousness,

one way to consistently articulate self-love as it is defined here and love of

others is by retrieving a key distinction Freud made in his 1914 text On

Narcissism, between ego-libido and object-libido, which he equates with

that between ego-instinct and libido. In order to exist, an ego has to have

basic interests, to assert itself, Freud argued. This initial form of self-love

is different from object-libido. There is indeed a form of pleasure in the

proto-self, but, as Freud insists, auto-eroticism is different from the ego-

instincts. To make the distinction between ego-libido and object-libido easily

understood, and thus to demarcate ego-libido from eroticism, Freud explains

it as the common distinction between hunger and love. The ego has

interests in pursuing its existence which are of a different order to the

libidinal attachment to objects. This, however, is the way in which Feuerbach

38
already explained the emergence of the object for the growing

consciousness:

The distinction into subject and object arises only in love;

love is the primary and most original self-consciousness in the

human. As long as the child desires the mother only for

nourishment, she is not yet object to the child. Only when love

awakens, only when the mother herself becomes the object of

attention and therefore the object of love, only then does the

distinction between the subject and the object arise (Thoughts,

40-41).

A good model drawing on these key distinctions and allowing us to

understand how object-relation and self-relation can be consistently

articulated might be the model of ontogenesis at the heart of Axel Honneths

theory of recognition. Honneth does not deny the existence of primary

narcissism. However, given his own intersubjectivistic emphasis, he sees

the infants primary self-love as an inchoate psychic force that becomes

structured when it is framed by a minimally supportive intersubjective

environment. Honneths key concept of positive self-relation designates a

form of self-love that is the outcome of sufficiently supportive care and

love brought by significant others. Honneths model shows how self-love can

be primordial, in the sense that it is the condition for any meaningful object-

39
attachment: without basic self-confidence, without a basic urge to assert

oneself, the subject is unable to attach to the world and its objects, simply

because it has no interest in it (Honneth, Struggle for Recognition). This basic

self-confidence in turn is so thoroughly indebted to external objects for its

very emergence and the way in which it is structured, that it can be seen as

the outcome of early relations to key objects. In the end, the final picture of

the genetic circle between self- and object-relation seems to be the one

Honneth describes in terms of internal communication ((Honneth,

Postmodern Identity, Appropriating Freedom). The essential objects

create the conditions through which the self can first of all relate to itself in

free, creative mode, and on the basis of this fluid relation to itself, relate

appropriately and creatively to the external objects and the world outside,

and the challenges they pose to subjective activity and affectivity.

The strong intersubjectivism in Feuerbach means that self-relation

without object-relation makes the self whither and ossify. As Freud later

wrote, strong egoism is a protection against falling ill, this is precisely what

defines the interests at the root of ego-instincts, but, equally, in the last

resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill

if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love (On Narcissism, 85).

The point Freud makes is not just instrumental, that we need others to

survive. A narcissism that does not translate into object-cathexis is bound to

lead to pathologies. Freud develops a hydraulic metaphoric to express this

thought: ego-libido that does not develop into object-libido becomes

40
dammed-up, can no longer finds modes of expression, fixates on imaginary

objects or turns on the ego itself. Later texts on the creation of symptoms

through anxiety repeatedly seek to problematize this idea of a self-related

libido that becomes the psychic fuel for the unfurling of violence of the self

against itself, so that libidinal repression somehow finds a release in psychic

self-harm (Inhibition, Symptom, Anxiety). This later Freudian view can also be

traced back to Feuerbach. Subjectivistic notions such as egoism,

subjectivism, personhood are consistently used by him as negative

symptoms indicating a pathological cultural development in which the self

has severed itself from the source and the fuel of healthy self-relation, that

is, object-relations and intersubjectivity (see in particular The distinction

between Christianity and heathenism, Essence, 150-159). It is this symptom

that makes Christianity the most dangerous of religions, as life-hating,

species- and sex-denying ideology. Feuerbach here inaugurates the long line

of critical philosophers, from Adornos diagnosis of the authoritarian

personality to Honneths diagnosis of suffering from indeterminacy, who

have linked social-historical criticism to a hermeneutic of pathologies of the

self as products of the social environment. Feuerbachs strong intuitions

regarding the radical dependency of self-flourishing upon the subjects

relations to its essential objects thus opened yet another strand that was

richly pursued by later theorists inspired by Hegel.

41
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