La critique feuerbachienne de la philosophie idéaliste de Hegel a beaucoup influencé ses contemporains et les matérialistes et humanistes du 19eme siècle. Cependant, les études françaises ne rendent pas compte de sa contribution à l'histoire de la philosophie autant qu'elles le devraient. Le but de ce travail est de présenter l'évolution de la pensée de Feuerbach de sa jeunesse hégélienne jusqu'à son matérialisme anthropologique et humaniste. Cette évolution est le résultat de la remise en cause progressive puis du renversement de la philosophie spéculative. Sa critique de la religion diffère profondément de celle des Lumières françaises dans le sens où loin de ne voir dans la religion qu'erreur, tromperie et fanatisme, il reconnaît que le religion exprime un trait anthropologique essentiel: l'essence de l'homme. La pensée de Feuerbach réside essentiellement alors dans une nouvelle interprétation du phénomène religieux en lui donnant une explication anthropologique. L'être humain est un mélange de rationalité et de sensibilité, d'affectivité et de passivité, qui doit être considéré en même temps en tant qu'individu et qu'être social. En opposition à l'interprétation de Marx, j'étudie plus particulièrement dans cette thèse, le rôle de la praxis sociale dans l'anthropologie feuerbachienne. Enfin, méthodologiquement, en plus d'une lecture attentive de l'ensemble du corpus feuerbachien, je re-contextualise sa pensée au sein du mouvement jeune-hégélien, et après la révolution de 1848. / Feuerbach's anthropological critique of Hegel's idealism has strongly influenced German materialists and humanists in the nineteenth-century as well as the following generations of thinkers. Even so particularly French scholars may still not recognize his contribution as central in the history of thought. The aim of my work is to present the development of Feuerbach's thought in particular how Feuerbach's early Hegelianism evolved into professing an empirical realism and materialist humanism, resulting in what was considered by Feuerbach himself as the negation of speculative German idealism. His critique of religion is fundamentally different from that of the French Enlightenment since according to him religion is not only fraudulent and deceptive, but also an essential anthropological feature. Essentially the thought of Feuerbach consists in a new interpretation of religion's phenomena, giving an anthropological explanation. For Feuerbach, the human subject was a complex weave of rationality and sensuality, affectivity and passivity, sociality and individualism. Contrasting with Marx's interpretation of Feuerbach, in this work 1 will study the role of the social praxis in Feuerbach's anthropology. Besides including a thorough reading of Feuerbach's work, my thesis will present a re-contextualisation of it in the Left Hegelian mouvement and after the March Revolution, as an additional rnaterial for my interpretation.

The purpose of this study is to present the different approaches, which Hegel and Marx have developed regarding the relation between consciousness and life, consistent with their aims. Hegel&rsquo / s aim is to combine all the opposed ideas and beliefs proposed throughout the history of philosophy into a unified whole. Hegel&rsquo / s dialectics which is immanent to life can also explain the opposition between consciousness and life. Self-consciousness, which appears as subjectivity in Hegel&rsquo / s philosophy, at first, treats the life as an object of desire. Later, however, self-consciousness which cannot thus realize itself desires another self-consciousness who will recognize itself, so it relates with an other self-consciousness. This relation is defined as a &ldquo / life and death struggle&rdquo / . At the end of the struggle, there arise new forms of self-consciousnesses, Master and Slave. While the Slave produces for its Master, it relates itself to Life and this relation between Slave and Life brings about Slave as self-consciousness. On the other hand, the aim of Marx is not only to combine the oppositions but also to create a worldly philosophy. To this end, Marx puts economic relations of human beings at the centre of his theory. According to Marx, relations of production condition classes. While one class produces, the other exploits the productions of the former class. In Hegel, the Slave obtains its certainty as self-consciousness while it produces, whereas in Marx, the worker, who produces, is alienated form him/herself in the capitalist mode of production. To sum up, both Hegel and Marx emphasize the mutual relation between consciousness and life, but their divergent aims lead to them constructing this relation with different concepts on different foundations.

In addition to his renowned musical output, Richard Wagner produced a logorrhoeic prose oeuvre, including a dramatic sketch of the last weeks of the life of Jesus Christ entitled Jesus von Nazareth. Though drafted in 1848-1849, it was published only posthumously, and has therefore been somewhat neglected in the otherwise voluminous Wagnerian literature. This thesis first examines the origins of Jesus von Nazareth amidst the climate of revolution wherein it was conceived, ascertaining its place within Wagner’s own internal development and amongst the radical thinkers who influenced it. While Ludwig Feuerbach has traditionally been seen as the most prominent of these, this thesis examines Wagner’s sources more broadly. The thesis then summarizes and analyzes Jesus von Nazareth itself, particularly in terms of Wagner’s use of biblical scripture. The thesis demonstrates how his not infrequent misuse thereof constitutes one way in which Wagner transmogrifies Jesus as mutable lens through which his own ideology of social revolution is reflected. It also attempts to provide a critical assessment of the relative dramatic merits of Jesus von Nazareth and looks into Wagner’s ultimate decision not to complete the work. The thesis then briefly summarizes the changes that occurred in Wagner’s mature Christological outlook subsequent to his drafting of Jesus von Nazareth, attempting to concisely demonstrate some developments beyond Wagner’s well-known encounter with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. The thesis concludes with an evaluation of how Jesus von Nazareth informed Wagner’s general religious outlook and the extent to which this worldview is a productive one.