#feuerbach

[empirearchives]

The introduction of the Napoleonic Code in Bavaria

Probably the best codification work of the Rhine Confederation period was the draft of a "General Civil Code for the Kingdom of Bavaria" from 1808/09, which was essentially based on the suggestions of Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach. By starting codification work, the Bavarian King Maximilian IV wanted to give in to Napoleon's urging to introduce his code in Bavaria as well. In a report for the Ministry of Justice in 1808 "on the manner of introducing the Code Napoleon in a German country", Feuerbach highlighted the main ideas of the Code Napoleon: freedom of the person; legal equality of subjects; equality of laws for all citizens of the state ; Freedom of property as well as independence and independence of the state from the church in all civil matters. For him, the Napoleonic Code was a result of the French Revolution: "It was the purpose of French legislation, on the one hand, to completely end the Revolution, on the other, to perpetuate the beneficial results of the Revolution".

Anyone who wants to destroy the basic ideas of a code of law through modification kills “the truly spiritual life of it and turns the living body into a corpse. In the modification retort, on which the inconvenient spiritus rector was supposed to evaporate, nothing more than a caput mortuum would ultimately remain, which would hardly be worth keeping. Precisely those parts of French legislation which contradict our existing German principles are its brightest points." When the discussions of the draft in the Privy Council were almost completed, the conservative aristocratic opposition brought down the proposal in 1809/10. Particularly because of the changes to mortgage law proposed by Feuerbach, the Bavarian draft represents a German version of the Napoleonic Code that is quite equal to the French original. Feuerbach paid particular attention to the linguistic version: insofar as a regulation of the Napoleonic Code should be retained, he was concerned with translating the French original into a "pure German legal language, not tainted by any provincialisms, possibly with the same advantages." However, this should not obscure the fact that the Commission has often exceeded the limits of mere translation. The most important change was that almost all traces of the French judicial constitution were erased from the draft. Article 530 of the Code Napoléon was also modified so that the replacement of perpetual basic pensions should only be permitted with the consent of both parties. The inheritance law was based on the succession order of Austrian law. The property law, which was almost completely ignored by the Napoleonic Code, was regulated in a separate chapter.

Source: Werner Schubert, Der Code civil (Code Napoléon) in Deutschland und das Reichsgericht

[Bold italics by me]

[soulthom]

Citation c-dessus en introduction de La Société Du Spectacle (Guy Debord).

Et j’ajouterais que le comique c’est l’ « authentique » qui au nom du spectaculaire, dans un idéalisme paradoxal, prétendra s’opposer au « vrai » en guise de justification !

[bocadosdefilosofia]

«El ser divino es la esencia humana transfigurada mediante la muerte de la abstracción; es el espíritu separado del hombre. En la religión se libera el hombre de los límites de la vida; aquí abandona lo que le oprime, paraliza y afecta en forma repugnante; Dios es el sentimiento de sí mismo del hombre liberado de toda repugnancia; libre, dichoso y feliz se siente el hombre únicamente en su religión, solamente aquí vive a su manera y celebra su domingo».

Ludwig Feuerbach: La esencia del cristianismo. Editorial Trotta, págs. 145-146. Madrid, 1995.

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

@dies-irae-1

[yngwrthr]

What Spinoza did not understand is thus that the initial, imperfect “intellectual tools” are the products of material labor, and not the products of nature. And in this — in nothing else — lies the weakness of his position. But he shares this weakness with Feuerbach. In no way should this shortcoming be called idealistic vacillations. It is simply an organic shortcoming of all old materialism.

Evald Ilyenkov quoted in Andrey Madainsky, “The Ilynekov Triangle: Marxism in Search of its Philosophical Roots”, in Stasis, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2017: Antiquity and Modernity of Soviet Marxism, p. 156.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

This painting of the temptation of christ is so fucking funny

[andrea-non-sa-tornare]

[kritikaltheory]

 To understand the capitalist domination over our lives and planet, we need to look not only at Marx, but also Feuerbach.  Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx put it in Capital. A massive amount of violence was necessary in order to dispossess peasants and force them “into the discipline necessary for the wage system. Once established, however, direct physical coercion ceased to the primary means by which the relations of production are reproduced. As Marx puts it: “The mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the labourer. Extra-economic, immediate violence [Außerökonomische, unmittelbare Gewalt] is sure enough still applied, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production”, i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, andguaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves”

 Too put it simply, function and mechanism of this domination - appearence of the capital as “natural laws of production” - is similar to what we can see in religion - holyness, sacralization, apperance of the capitalist relations as something not not only natural, but also holy and sacred.   The analogy between the dominance of the economy and the religious inversion of subject and object is drawn by Marx himself, not only in his early writings, but also in manuscripts from the 1860s: “As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand”. This analogy is really Feuerbachian and takes a lot from his definition of religion as “Selbstentfremdung”/ “ self-estrangement” - a power that duplicates the current reality “into a religious, imaginary world, and a secular [weltliche] one.”  The power of value is thus understood as the sacralization of social structures, leading to the transformation of the latter into an ‘alien power’ confronting the members of society. The power of capital is accordingly not to be understood as the domination of one class by another, but as “the self-domination of labour”. As Postone put it in his “Time, Labor and Social Domination”: “domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute. Marx sought to grasp this form of abstract, structural domination – which encompasses, and extends beyond, class domination – with his categories of the commodity and capital. (…) the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by capitalists of the surplus product and the means of production; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself”  The form of power implied by the value form is characterised as abstract, thing-like,impersonal and structural. It is abstract because capital is the self-referential movement of materialised real abstractions like the money and commodities. It is “impersonal” because this power does subject people to a specific person or a specific group of people, but to capital as ‘the automatic subject’. Concrete people are only the personifications of social functions. It is thing-like in the sense that it is the movement of things – commodities and money – on the market that rule over people. It is structural, because this power is a consequence of the basic social structure of production in capitalism, i.e. the fact that production takes place privately and independently and is mediated through the market.  This is opposed to the predominant forms of power in pre-capitalist modes of production, which primarily took the form of direct, ‘extra-economic’ coercion and relations of personal dependence. The slave or the feudal peasant was entangled in networks of personal dependence upheld by (the threat of) violence, whereas the ‘free labourer’ in capitalism is ruled by a system of economic abstractions.

[ephemeral-joy]

"Deine erste Pflicht ist, dich selbst glücklich zu machen. Bist du glücklich, machst du auch andere glücklich." Ludwig Feuerbach