by Ludwig Feuerbach (1828)

On November 22, 1828, the twenty-four-year-old Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) wrote to his former teacher G.W.F. Hegel, sending his doctoral dissertation. What was ostensibly a cover letter became a philosophical manifesto: Feuerbach declared that philosophy must break out of the school and become "a general world-historical and public intuition," that Christianity is not the absolute religion but merely "the religion of the pure self," that nature lies "uncomprehended" in Christianity, and that reason must be "redeemed" through "the actualization and secularization of the idea." Thirteen years later, Feuerbach would publish The Essence of Christianity, arguing that God is a projection of human nature — the book that, as Engels later wrote, "placed materialism on the throne again."

Translated for marxists.org. Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike).

I take the liberty, dear Professor, of sending you my dissertation. Not that I attach any particular value to it, or that I imagine it holds in and for itself any interest for your mind. I send it only because I, its author, stand to you in the special relationship of an immediate disciple to his teacher, inasmuch as for two years I attended your lectures in Berlin and may thereby attest to the high esteem and veneration due to my teacher, which I gladly acknowledge as my duty.

I am aware that the ideas engendered or awakened in me by you and expressed in your philosophy do not obtain on high in the universal sphere, beyond the sensuous and the apparent, but continue to act in me creatively. They issue, so to speak, from the heaven of their colorless purity, immaculate clarity, beautitude, and unity with themselves, descending and taking form in an intuition which penetrates the particular, cancels and masters appearance within appearance itself.

I am aware, further, that my dissertation bears within it, at least in general though in an altogether imperfect, crude, and mistaken form which fails to avoid abstraction, the trace of a manner of philosophizing which could be called the actualization and secularization of the idea, the ensarkosis or Incarnation of the pure logos.

For the philosophy which bears your name is, as acquaintance with history and philosophy itself teaches, not the affair of a school, but of humanity. At the very least the spirit of the latest philosophy claims, perforce tends, to burst the bounds of a single school, to become a general world-historical and public intuition.

It is thus now a question, so to speak, of founding a Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Idea, of thought which contemplates itself in all that exists and is conscious of itself.

Christianity cannot, for this reason, be conceived as the perfect and absolute religion. This can only be the Kingdom of actuality, of the Idea, of existing reason. Christianity is nothing other than the religion of the pure self, of the person taken as a solitary spirit — which holds forth in general. Christianity is by this fact but the antithesis of the ancient world.

What meaning, for example, does nature have in this religion? What a spiritless, thoughtless place does nature have in it? And yet just this absence of spirit and thought is one of the underlying pillars of this religion. Indeed, nature lies there uncomprehended, mysterious, and taken up into the unity of the divine essence so that only the person — not nature, nor the world, not spirit — celebrates its salvation, a salvation which in fact is only to be found in knowledge.

That is why reason is not yet redeemed in Christianity.

Since the foundation and source of every religion lies in philosophy, in a definite mode of intuition on which the religion originally rests, the finite, the negative, the beyond of which Christianity itself has a presentiment admits of proof in the most categorical and convincing manner.

But the striving of the individual must now be so directed that through religion Spirit as Spirit may hold forth in appearance as nothing other than itself.

With the most profound and sincere respect,
your honor's most humble
Ludwig Feuerbach, Dr. of Philosophy.

Colophon

Letter to Hegel, by Ludwig Feuerbach, November 22, 1828.

Note: This is an abridged archival edition preserving the key philosophical passages. The full letter, including Feuerbach's extended discussion of the Kingdom of the Idea and the overcoming of dualism, is available at marxists.org.

Source: Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org). Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike).

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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