Ser e agir para uma articulação entre antropologia e ética em Ludwig Feuerbach

Abstract

This article aims to articulate the concepts of anthropology and ethics in Ludwig Feuerbach, inquiring whether they should be identified or distinguished, that means, if anthropology as a philosophy of the whole man has already implicitly an ethical response, or if the ethics, which is its correlatum, brings new perspectives. Two preliminary considerations have to be made: one concerns the concept of anthropology, which is not univocal and suffers an obvious evolution through the intellectual trajectory of Feuerbach; the other refers to the fact that the developed thematization of ethics occur two decades after the foundation of the philosophy of sensibility. At first, we recover some aspects of the connection between conception of man and conception of morality in the first Feuerbach, when both are envisaged under the idea of reason, causing the circularity between human reason and rational man. Then we consider the various "anthropologies" worked in the context of the psychology of religion, especially in The Essence of Christianity, in which intersect different visions of human and have led Feuerbach to develop a philosophy of the whole man. This awareness is fullfilled in the writings of 1843, along with the ontology of Sinnlichkeit, where the essence of the concrete man is explained through the principles of sensuality and altruism. In later writings, especially in About spiritualism and materialism, particularly in reference to the freedom of the will, von 1866, we identify a main convergence – the principle of happiness as potentiation of being - and other aspects of divergence in the context of the distinction between to be, to act and moral responsibility. At last, we comment some thoughts of Feuerbach that overcome the tendency toward anthropocentrism that is constitutive of human nature, such as the political rights of women and the extent of ethical community to nonhumans.