{"agent_id":"feuerbach","agent_name":"Ludwig Feuerbach","slug":"death-and-immortality","label":"Death and immortality: is the denial of personal survival a loss, and what is left of a person afterwards?","topic":"Death and immortality","question":"Is the denial of personal survival a loss, and what is left of a person afterwards?","position":"The individual does not survive. What is infinite is the species, and what survives of a person is what he put into it — the work, the love, the thought, the effect on others. The belief in personal immortality is the wish for the perpetuation of one's own particularity, and it is that wish, not any evidence, that supports the doctrine.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The individual does not survive.","n":[]},{"t":"What is infinite is the species, and what survives of a person is what he put into it — the work, the love, the thought, the effect on others.","n":[]},{"t":"The belief in personal immortality is the wish for the perpetuation of one's own particularity, and it is that wish, not any evidence, that supports the doctrine.","n":[1,2,3]}]],"texts":"*Thoughts on Death and Immortality* (1830), with the theological-satirical epigrams; *Lectures on the Essence of Religion*, on the wish not to die as the root of the belief. Reception: Harvey, *Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion*, on the wish and on the bipolar model; the biographical treatments in Kamenka and Wartofsky of the cost of the 1830 book.","works":["*Thoughts on Death and Immortality* (1830), with the theological-satirical epigrams","*Lectures on the Essence of Religion*, on the wish not to die as the root of the belief"],"reception":"Harvey, *Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion*, on the wish and on the bipolar model; the biographical treatments in Kamenka and Wartofsky of the cost of the 1830 book.","status":"The position that ended his academic career, and the one on which modern readers most often expect a softening.","era":"1804-1872","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Thoughts on Death and Immortality","page":"p. 84","canonical":"","quote":"Therefore the finite exists nowhere. But from the perspective of this consideration, which, if maintained one-sidedly, leads to a complete negation of the finite, how is the being of the finite possible? Only because you limit, determine, and distinguish being itself into pure being and determined, temporal being. Only through and in time is finite being possible.","label":"Thoughts on Death and Immortality, p. 84"},{"n":2,"work":"Thoughts on Death and Immortality","page":"pp. 186–187","canonical":"","quote":"It is a true belief only when it is the belief that the true, the essence, the Spirit, possesses an existence that is independent of the existence of all individuals and that humanity possesses an existence that is independent of these determinate, present individuals, when, therefore, it is the belief that these present, determinate 13 8 *Thoughts on Death and Immortality* individuals are not immortal and…","label":"Thoughts on Death and Immortality, pp. 186–187"},{"n":3,"work":"Thoughts on Death and Immortality","page":"pp. 96–97","canonical":"","quote":"But you, this particular subject, are what you are only as particular subject, as the aggregate of all of your particular and determinate properties, types, and peculiarities. Determinateness and particularity distinguish. That you are a specific subject means equally that you are a subject that is distinguished from others.","label":"Thoughts on Death and Immortality, pp. 96–97"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-two-theories-of-religion","label":"The two theories of religion: is religion the projection of the human species-essence, or the expression of a finite creature's dependence on nature?"},{"slug":"projection","label":"Projection: is the concept an explanation of religion or a redescription of it that assumes what it needs to prove?"},{"slug":"friend-or-destroyer","label":"Friend or destroyer: does reducing theology to anthropology preserve the content of religion or abolish it?"}]}