‘The faith of man in himself:’ locating Feuerbach in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though it is acknowledged that Nietzsche read Ludwig Feuerbach, little attention has been given to the significance of Feuerbach’s anthropological re-imagination of religion for the trajectory of Nietzsche’s own vision for liberated humanity, the Übermensch. For Feuerbach, the Christian religion represents a form of wish-fulfillment and subconscious worship of the human being as divine, where many of the presuppositions of orthodox Christianity (monotheism, human fallenness, other-worldliness, etc.) only impede human flourishing. The acknowledgement of the psychological damage wrought by the scheme and implications of Christian metaphysics is, for Feuerbach and Nietzsche alike, a necessary step in liberating humans from their own self-imposed shackles and enabling the human spirit to actualize its latent potentialities. This paper aims to identify Feuerbachian themes that Nietzsche appropriates for his own purposes in Thus Spake Zarathustra, attending to Nietzsche’s early reading of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) during a key period of his intellectual development (1861–1863), and arguing that Feuerbach’s impact on Nietzsche is far more subtle and profound than commonly recognized.