On Appreciating the Arguments of Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach was a skeptical pioneer who influenced Karl Marx. The first edition of his influential skeptical book, The Essence of Christianity, was criticized widely by the public at large as "baseless." So in the Preface to the Second Edition two years later, he explains why so many people thought his work was bad, just like many Christians think my work is bad. While I'm not comparing myself to him, what he said in response was brilliant:
I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man...Hence, in all my works, as well as in the present one, I have made utmost clearness, simplicity, and definiteness a law to myself, so that they may be understood, at least in the main, by every cultivated and thinking man. But notwithstanding this, my work can be appreciated and fully understood only by the scholar...I very frequently refer to this or that historical phenomenon without expressly designating it, thinking this superfluous; and such references can be understood by the scholar alone. Thus, for example, in the very first chapter, where I develop the necessary consequences of the standpoint of Feeling, I allude to Jacobi and Schleiermacher; in the second chapter I allude chiefly to Kantism, Scepticism, Theism, Materialism, and Pantheism; in the chapter on 'The Standpoint of Religion,' where I discusss the contradictions between the religious or theological and the physical or natural-philosophical view of Nature, I refer to philosophy in the age of orthodoxy, and especially to the philosophy of Descartes and Leibniz, in which this contradiction presents itself in a peculiarly characteristic manner. The reader, therefore, who is unacquainted with the historical facts and ideas presupposed in my work, will fail to perceive on what my arguments and ideas hinge; no wonder if my positions often appear to him baseless, however firm the footing on which they stand.
Couldn't have said it better! I write for the educated person in the pew but in order not to see my arguments as baseless one needs to understand what is presupposed by them, and that requires some level of scholarship to do so, since I'm taking the arguments of the scholars and trying my best to bring it to the common man. My attempt at saying this same thing can be read here.

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