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Title: The Reaction in Germany Author: Michail Bakunin Date: 1842 Language: en Topics: Dialectics; Source: Retrieved on 18/07/2015 from https://libcom.org/library/reaction-germany-mikhail-bakunin][libcom.org]]. Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3211, retrieved on July 15, 2020. Notes: ‘Die Reaktion in Deutschland. Ein Fragment von einem Franzosen’ first appeared in Arnold Ruge (ed.), Deutsche Jahrbücher fur Wissenschaft and Kunst, nos. 247–51 (Leipzig, October 17th-21st, 1842) under the pseudonym “Jules Elysard”. Die Reaktion was written in response to Ruge’s call set forth in the Preface to the first edition of Deutsche Jahrbücher for all Hegelians to enter into political struggle.
Freedom, the realization of freedom: who can deny that this expression
today stands at the head of the agenda of history? Friend and foe must
admit it; indeed, no one dares openly and fearlessly to profess that he
is an enemy of freedom. But the expression, the profession, does not
make the reality, as the Gospel well knows. Unfortunately, there is
still a multitude of people who in fact, in their innermost hearts, do
not believe in freedom. And so, for freedom’s sake, it is worth our
while to concern ourselves with these people. They are of very different
kinds.
First of all we encounter high-placed, aged and experienced people who
in their youth were themselves dilettantes in political freedom — a
distinguished and rich man takes a piquant pleasure in speaking about
freedom and equality, and in doing makes him twice as interesting in
business. These men now try to hide their physical and spiritual laxity
under the seal of that much abused word, ‘experience’, now that their
former interest has left them along with their capacity for youthful
vitality.
There is no profit in speaking with these people: they were never
serious about freedom and freedom for them a religion which offers the
greatest pleasure and the highest bliss only by means of the most
extreme conflicts, of the bitterest griefs, and of complete,
unconditional self-denial. There is no profit in speaking with them, if
only because they are old and are going to die soon bon gré mal gré.
There are also, unfortunately, many young people who share the same
convictions or, rather, lack of any conviction. These belong either, and
for the most part, to the aristocracy which in its essence has long been
politically dead in Germany, or to the burgher, commercial and officer
classes. There is nothing you can do with these either, and, indeed,
even less than with the first category of prudent and aged people whose
death is already so near. Those had at least a glimmer of life, but the
latter are lifeless and dead men from the very beginning. Completely
involved in their paltry, vain, or monetary interests, and completely
occupied by their commonplace concerns, they have not even the slightest
conception of life and of what goes on around them. Had they not heard
something of history and of the development of the spirit in school,
they would apparently believe that nothing in the world had ever been
different from the way it is now. They are colorless, ghostly beings.
They can do neither good nor ill. We have nothing to fear from them, for
only that which is alive can be effective, and, since it is no longer
fashionable to associate with ghosts, we too shall not waste our time
with them.
But there is still a third category of adversaries of the principle of
revolution: that is the Reactionary party which emerged all over Europe
soon after the Restoration. In politics it is called Conservatism, in
jurisprudence the Historical School, and in the science of speculation,
Positive Philosophy. With these we want to speak. It would be poor taste
in our part if we ignored their existence and acted as if we considered
them insignificant. On the contrary, we shall honestly admit that they
are now everywhere the ruling party. And more still: we want to concede
that their present power is not due to a play of chance but has its deep
ground in the development of the modern Spirit. Anyhow, I concede no
true power to chance in history — history is free, but consequently
necessary, development of the free Spirit, so that if I wanted to call
the present supremacy of the Reactionary Party a chance event I would,
in so doing, render the worst possible service to the democratic creed
which uniquely and alone is founded on the unconditional freedom of
Spirit. Such an evil, deceitful sedative would be much more dangerous
for us: unfortunately we are as yet still far from understanding our
position and, in the only too frequent misunderstanding of the true
source of our power and of the nature of our enemy, we must either
wholly lose our courage, depressed by the deary picture of daily
drudgery or — and this is perhaps worse, since a vital human being
cannot long tolerate despair, there comes upon us a groundless, boyish,
and fruitless exuberance. Nothing can be more useful to the Democratic
party than the recognition of its weakness and of the relative strength
of its adversary at this stage. Through this recognition the Democratic
party first steps out of the uncertainty of fantasy and into the reality
which it must live, suffer, and, in the end, conquer. Through this
recognition its enthusiasm becomes discreet and humble. Only if it first
comes to an awareness of its holy, priestly office through this painful
contact with reality; only if it recognizes through the endless
difficulties which stand everywhere in its way and which flow not only
from the obscurantism of its adversaries, and it often seems to imply,
but also and rather from the fullness and totality of human nature which
cannot be exhausted in abstract theoretical propositions — only if it
first recognizes through these difficulties the inadequacy of its whole
present existence and thus comes to understand that its enemy is at hand
not only externally but also and much more internally, and that it must
therefore begin by conquering its internal enemy; only if it first
convinces itself that Democracy not only stands in opposition to the
government and is not only a particular constitutional or
politico-economic change, but a total transformation of that world
condition and a herald of an original, new life which has not yet
existed in history; especially only if it first comes to understand that
Democracy is a religion, if it thus through this awareness itself
becomes religious, that is, permeated by its principle not only in
thought and reasoning, but true to it also in real life down to life’s
smallest manifestations, only then will the Democratic party really
conquer the world.
Consequently, we want to admit candidly that the present power of the
Reactionary party is not contingent but necessary. It has its ground not
in the inadequacy of the Democratic principle — this is indeed that of
the equality of man realizing itself in freedom and thus also is the
most intrinsic, universal, and all-embracing, in a word the unique
essence of the Spirit self-operating in history. The present power of
the Reactionary party is due, rather, to the inadequacy of the
Democratic party which has not yet reached an affirmative consciousness
of its principle and therefore exists only as the negation of the
prevailing reality. As such, as mere negation, the whole fullness of
life is necessarily external to it; it cannot yet develop this fullness
out of its principle which it conceives almost wholly negatively.
Consequently, it has up to now been only a party and not yet the living
reality; it has been the future, not the present. This fact, that the
democrats constitute only a party — and, indeed, a weak party so far as
its external existence is concerned — and that their being only a party
presupposes the existence of another, opposed, strong party — this fact
alone should already give them an explanation of their true, essential,
inherent deficiency. With respect to its essence, its principle, the
Democratic party is the universal, all-embracing one, but, with respect
to its existence, it is only a particular one, the Negative, against
which stands another particular one, the Positive. The whole
significance and the irrepressible power of the Negative is the
annihilation of the Positive; but along with the Positive it leads
itself to destruction as this evil, particular existence which is
inadequate to its essence. Democracy does not yet exist independently in
its affirmative abundance, but only as the denial of the Positive, and
therefore, in this evil state, it too must be destroyed along with the
Positive, so that from its free ground it may spring forth again in a
newborn state, as its own living fullness. And this self-change of the
Democratic party will not be merely a quantitative change, i.e., a
broadening of its present particular and hence evil existence: God save
us, such a broadening would be the leveling of the whole world and the
end result of all of history would be absolute nothingness — but a
qualitative transformation, a new, vital, and life-creating revelation,
a new heaven and a new earth, a young and magnificent world in which all
present discords will resolve themselves into harmonious unity.
The inadequacy of the Democratic party can still less be mitigated by
transcending the one-sidedness of its existence as a party through an
eternal mediation with the Positive — this would be a vain endeavor, for
the Positive and the Negative are once and for all incompatible. Insofar
as it is isolated in its contradiction to the Positive and is taken for
itself, the Negative appears at first to be empty and lifeless; and this
apparent emptiness is also the principal reproach which the Positives
make to the Democrats — a reproach which, however, rests only on a
misunderstanding. In fact, as a thing in isolation, the Negative is not
at all; as such it would be nothing. It exists only in contradiction to
the Positive. Its whole being, its content and its vitality are simply
the destruction of the Positive. ‘Revolutionary propaganda,’ says the
Pentarchist, ‘is, in its deepest essence, the negation of the existing
conditions of the state; for, with respect to its innermost nature, it
has no other program than the destruction of whatever order prevails at
the time.’ But is it possible that that whose whole life is only to
destroy should externally be reconciled with that which, according to
its innermost nature, it must destroy? Only half-men who seriously take
sides neither with the Positive nor with the Negative can argue in such
a fashion.
There are two major divisions within the Reactionary party today: to the
one belong the pure Consistent reactionaries, and to other the
inconsistent, Compromising reactionaries. The first interpret the
contradiction in its pure form; they feel indeed that the Positive and
the Negative get along no more than fire and water; and, since they do
not see in the Negative its affirmative aspect and so cannot believe in
the Negative, they quite rightly conclude that the Positive must be
maintained through a complete suppression of the Negative. That they do
not perceive that the Positive is as such a Positive which they defend
only insofar as the Negative opposes it, and that consequently, in the
event of a complete victory over the Negative, it would no longer be the
Positive but rather its contradictory, the completion of the Negative —
that they do not perceive this must be forgiven them, since blindness is
the main characteristic of all that is positive and insight belongs only
to the Negative. We must be very grateful to these gentlemen, however,
in our evil and unscrupulous times, when so many seek out of cowardice
to conceal from themselves the strict consequences of their own
principles in order thus to escape the danger of becoming disturbed in
the artificial and weak system of their pretended convictions. These
gentlemen are sincere, honest; they want to be whole men. One cannot
talk much with them, for they never want to enter into a sensible
conversation. It is so difficult for them now, since the dissolving
poison of the Negative has spread everywhere; it is so difficult, indeed
almost impossible, for them to maintain themselves in pure Positivity
that they withdraw from their own reason and must be afraid of
themselves, of the slightest attempt to demonstrate, which would be to
refute, their convictions. They feel this strongly and hence also speak
crossly when they must speak. And yet they are honest and whole men, or,
more correctly, they want to be honest and whole men. Just like us, they
hate everything that is halfhearted for they know that only a whole man
can be good and that halfheartedness is the putrid source of all evil.
These fanatical reactionaries accuse us of heresy. If it were possible
they would perhaps even call out of the arsenal of history the
subterranean power of the Inquisition in order to use it against us.
They deny us all that is good, all that is human. They see in us nothing
other than embodied Antichrists, against whom every means is permitted.
Shall we repay them with the same coin? No; it would be unworthy of us
and of the great cause whose agents we are. The great principle in whose
service we have pledged ourselves gives us, among many other advantages,
the fine privilege of being just and impartial without, by so being,
harming our cause. Nothing partial can use truth itself as a weapon, for
truth is the refutation of all one-sidedness; whereas all one-sidedness
must be partial and fanatical in its utterance, and hate is its
necessary expression, for it can maintain itself in no other way than by
opposing, through a violent repulsion, all other one-sidedness, even if
as legitimate as itself. One-sidedness by its very presence presupposes
the presence of other one-sidednesses, and yet, as a consequence of its
essential nature, it must exclude these in order to maintain itself.
This conflict is the curse which hangs over one-sidedness, a curse
innate to it, a curse which transforms into hatred in their very
utterance all the good sentiments that are innate in every man as man.
We are infinitely more fortunate in this respect. As a party we indeed
stand in opposition to the Positives and fight them, and all evil
passions are awakened also in us through this fight. Insofar as we
ourselves belong to a party, we are also very often partial and unjust.
But we are not only this Negative party set in opposition to the
Positive: we have our living source in the all-embracing principle of
unconditional freedom, in a principle which contains in itself all the
good that is contained only in the Positive and which is exalted above
the Positive just as over ourselves as a party. As a party we pursue
only politics, but as a party we are justified only through our
principle; otherwise we would have no better ground than the Positive.
Hence, we must remain true, even contrary to our self-preservation, to
our principle as the only ground of our power and of our life; i.e., we
must eternally transcend ourselves as this one-sided, merely political
existence in the religion of our all-embracing and all-sided principle.
We must not only act politically, but in our politics also act
religiously, religiously in the sense of freedom of which the one true
expression is justice and love. Indeed, for us alone, who are called the
enemies of the Christian religion, for us alone is it reserved, and even
made the highest duty even in the most ardent of fights, really to
exercise love, this highest commandment of Christ and this only way of
true Christianity.
And so we want to be just also with respect to our enemies, we want to
recognize that they are striving really to want the good, that indeed in
their nature they are called to the good, to a vital life, and that they
have deviated from their true destiny only owing to an incomprehensible
misfortune. We are not speaking of those who have joined their party
only in order to be able to give vent to their evil passions. There are,
unfortunately, many Tartuffes in every party; we are speaking only of
the sincere defenders of Consistent Positivism. These strive after the
good, but they cannot effectively will it; this is their great
misfortune, they are divided in themselves. In the principle of freedom
they see only a cold and prosaic abstraction — to which many prosaic and
dry defenders of freedom have greatly contributed. They see only an
abstraction which excludes all that is vital, all that is beautiful and
holy. They do not perceive that this principle is by no means to be
confused with its current evil and merely negative existence, and that
it is only as a living self-affirmation which has transcended the
Negative as well as the Positive that it can conquer and that it will
realize itself. They believe — and this belief is unfortunately still
shared by many adherents of the Negative party itself — that the
Negative tries to diffuse itself as such, and they think, just as we do,
that the diffusion would be the leveling of the whole spiritual world.
At the same time, in the directness of their feeling, they have a wholly
justified endeavor toward a vital full life, and, since they find in the
Negative only its leveling, they turn back to the past, to the past as
it was before the birth of the contradiction between the Negative and
the Positive. They are right insofar as this past really was in itself a
living whole and as such appears much more vital and much richer than
the divided present. Their great mistake, however, consists in this,
that they think that they can recreate it in its past vitality; they
forget that the past totality can by now appear only in the amorphous
and cracked reflection of the present inevitable contradiction which
that totality entails, and that the totality, as positive, is only its
own corpse, with its soul torn from it, i.e., the corpse as delivered up
to the mechanical and chemical processes of thought. As adherents of
blind Positivism they do not understand this, whereas with respect to
their nature as vital men they feel this deficiency of life full well.
And since they do not know that by the very fact that they are Positive
they have the Negative within them, they throw onto the Negative the
whole blame for this deficiency, and the whole weight of their urge for
life and truth, by this impotence to satisfy itself, turns into hate.
This is the necessary inner process in every Consistent Positivist, and
therefore I say also that they are really to be pitied, since the source
of their endeavor is yet almost always honest.
The Compromising Positivists hold an entirely different position. They
distinguish themselves from the Consistent Positivists in the first
place in that, more rotted than these by speculative disease of the
time, they not only do not condemn the Negative unconditionally as an
absolute evil but concede to it a relative, transitory justification;
and, in the second place, in that they do not possess the same energetic
purity, a purity for which the Consistent, ruthless Positivists at least
strive and which we have designated as the characteristic of a full,
complete, and honest nature. The standpoint of the Compromisers we may
in contrast designate as that of theoretical dishonesty, I say
theoretical because I would rather avoid any practical, personal
accusation and because I do not believe that a personally evil will
could really intervene obstructively in the development of Spirit;
although it must be admitted that theoretical dishonesty by its very
nature almost always reverts into a practical one.
The Compromising Positivists are cleverer and have more insight than the
Consistent ones. They are the clever men, the theorists par excellence,
and to that extent they are also the chief representatives of the
present time. We can apply to them what was said in a French journal at
the beginning of the July Revolution about the Juste-milieu: The Left
says, 2 times 2 are 4; the Right, 2 times 2 are 6; and the Juste-milieu
says, 2 times 2 are 5. But they would take this amiss. Hence we want to
try to investigate their unclear and difficult essence in all
earnestness and with the deepest respect for their wisdom. It is much
more difficult to deal with them than with the Consistent ones: the
latter have the practical energy of their convictions; they know and
they speak in clear words and say what they mean to say; they hate, just
as we do, all uncertainty, all confusion, for as practically energetic
beings they can breathe only in a pure and clear air. With the
Compromisers, however, it is a curious matter. They are wily; oh, they
are clever and wise! They never permit the practical impulse toward
truth to destroy the meticulously patchworked edifice of their theory.
They are too experienced, too clever, to grant a gracious hearing to the
beseeching voice of simple, practical conscience. From the height of
their position they look down on it with condescension and, if we say
only the simple is true and real because only such a thing can work
creatively, they maintain in reply that only the composite is true, for
it has cost the greatest pains to piece such a thing together and
because it is the only characteristic by which one can distinguish them,
the clever people, from the stupid and uneducated mob. Consequently it
is very difficult to deal with them, because all is known to them;
because, as worldly-wise people, they consider it an unforgivable
weakness to let themselves be astonished by anything; because they have
by their thinking penetrated every corner of the natural and spiritual
universe, and because, after this long and laborious speculative
journey, they have reached the conviction that it is not worth the
bother to enter into real, vital contact with the real world. It is
difficult to come to an understanding with these people, since, just
like the German constitutions, they take back with the right hand what
they offer with the left. They never answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ ; they say:
‘To a certain extent you are right, but, yet ...’ and, if they have
nothing left to say, they say: ‘Yes, it is a curious thing.’
And yet we want to try to contend with them. The party of the
Compromisers, despite its inner lack of principle and its inability to
effect anything on its own, is today a powerful, indeed the most
powerful party — numerically, of course, not with respect to its
content. It is one of the most important signs of the times, and so we
dare not ignore it and bypass it.
The whole wisdom of the Compromisers consists in this, that they
maintain that two opposing trends are as such one-sided and therefore
untrue; but, they argue, if the two members of the contradiction are
untrue when taken abstractly in themselves, then the truth must lie in
their middle, and so one must inter-correlate them to arrive at the
truth. This reasoning at first appears irrefutable: indeed, we have
ourselves admitted that the Negative, insofar as it is opposed to the
Positive and is self-oriented in this opposition, is one-sided. Then
does it not necessarily follow from this that the Negative is
essentially fulfilled and completed by the Positive? And are not the
Compromisers right in wanting to reconcile the Positive and the
Negative? Yes, if this reconciliation is possible; but is it really
possible? Is not the annihilation of the Positive the only meaning of
the Negative? If the Compromisers ground their position on the nature of
contradiction, namely on the fact that two opposing one-sidednesses are
as such mutually dependent, then they must accept and recognize each
nature to its full extent; they must do this for the sake of
consistency, in order themselves to remain true to their own position.
For the side of the contradiction which is favorable to them is
inseparable from its unfavorable side; but this unfavorable side
consists in this, that it is not positive but negative, destructive, to
give priority to one member over the other. The gentlemen are to be
referred to Hegel’s logic, where the category of contradiction is so
beautifully treated.
Contradiction and its immanent development constitute a keynote of the
whole Hegelian system, and since this category is the chief category of
the governing spirit of our times, Hegel is unconditionally the greatest
philosopher of the present time, the highest summit of our modern,
one-sided, theoretical cultural formation. Indeed, just like this
summit, just by the fact that he has comprehended and thus resolved this
category, just by this fact is he also the beginning of a necessary
self-resolution of modern cultural formation: as this summit he has
already gone above theory — granted that at the same time he is still
within theory — and has postulated a new, practical world which will
bring itself to completion by no means through a formal application and
diffusion of theories already worked out, but only through an original
act of the practical autonomous Spirit. Contradiction is the essence not
only of every specific, particular theory, but also of theory in
general, and so the dialectical phase of its comprehension is
simultaneously the phase of the fulfilment of theory; but its fulfilment
is its self-resolution into an original and new, practical world, into
the real presence of freedom. But this is not yet the place to develop
this further, and we want to turn again to the discussion of the logical
theory of contradiction.
Contradiction itself, as the embracing of its two one-sided members, is
total, absolute, true. One cannot reproach it with one-sidedness or with
the superficiality and poverty which are necessarily bound up with
one-sidedness, since it is not only the Negative, but also the Positive,
and since, as this all-embracing thing, it is total, absolute,
all-inclusive fullness. This entitles the Compromisers to forbid that
one of the two one-sided members be taken in the abstract, and to
require that they be comprehended as a totality in their necessary
union, in their inseparability. Only the contradiction is true, they
say, and either of its opposed members, taken by itself, is one-sided
and thus untrue; hence we have to grasp the contradiction in its
totality in order to have truth. But this is just where the difficulty
begins. Contradiction is indeed truth, but it does not exist as such, it
is not there as this totality; it is only a self-subsisting, hidden
totality, and its existence is just the conflicting cleavage of its two
members, the Positive and the Negative. Contradiction as the total truth
is the inseparable unity of the simplicity and cleavage of itself in
one; this is its implicit, hidden, but thus also at first
incomprehensible nature, and just because this unity is a hidden one,
contradiction exists also one-sidedly as the mere cleavage of its
members. It is present only as Positive and Negative, and these mutually
exclude each other to such an extent that this mutual exclusion
constitutes their whole nature. But then how are we to comprehend the
totality of contradiction? Here there appear to remain two ways out:
either we must arbitrarily abstract from the cleavage and flee to the
simple totality of the contradiction, which totality is prior to the
cleavage — but this is impossible, because the incomprehensible is
simply incomprehensible, and because contradiction in itself exists
immediately only as cleavage, without this it is not at all; or we must
in a maternal way try to reconcile the opposed members. And in this
consists the whole effort of the Compromiser School. Let us see whether
they really succeed.
The positive appears at first to be the restful, the immobile. It is
Positive indeed only because it rests in itself without disturbance and
because it contains nothing that it could negate;[1] only because it
contains no movement, since every movement is a negation. The Positive
is just the sort of thing in which immobility as such reposes, the sort
of thing which is reflected in itself as the absolutely immobile. But
reflection on immobility is inseparable from reflection on mobility; or
rather they are one and the same reflection, and so the Positive,
absolute rest, is positive only in contrast to the Negative, absolute
unrest. The Positive is internally related to the Negative as its own
vital determination. Thus the Positive has a double place in relation to
the Negative: on the one hand it rests in itself and in this apathetic
self-sufficiency contains nothing of the Negative; on the other,
however, and just because of this rest, as something in itself opposed
to the Negative, it actively excludes the Negative; but this activity of
exclusion is a motion and so the Positive, just because of its
positivity, is in itself no longer the Positive, but the Negative; in
that it excludes the Negative from itself, it excludes itself from
itself and drives itself to destruction.
Consequently, the Positive and the Negative do not, as the Compromisers
think, have equal justification. Contradiction is not an equilibrium but
a preponderance of the Negative, which is its encroaching dialectical
phase. The Negative, as determining the life of the Positive itself,
alone includes within itself the totality of the contradiction, and so
it alone also has absolute justification. What, someone will perhaps ask
me; have you not yourself admitted to us that the Negative, taken in
itself abstractly, is just as one-sided as the Positive, and that the
diffusion of its evil existence would be a leveling of the whole world?
Yes, but I was speaking only of the present existence of the Negative,
of the Negative insofar as, excluded from the Positive, it is peacefully
self-oriented and so is positive; as such it is also negated by the
Positive, and the Consistent Positivists, in denying the existence of
the Negative, its peaceful self-orientation, are performing both a
logical and a holy service — although they do not know what they do.
They believe that they are negating the Negative while, on the contrary,
they are negating the Negative only insofar as it is making itself
Positive; they awaken the Negative from its Philistine repose, to which
it is not fitted, and they lead it back to its great calling, to the
restless and ruthless annihilation of every positively existing thing.
We shall grant that the Positive and the Negative, if the latter is
peacefully and egoistically self-oriented and so untrue to itself, have
equal justification. But the Negative should not be egoistic; it should
lovingly surrender to the Positive in order to consume it and, in this
religious, faithful, and vital act of denial, to reveal its
inexhaustible and pregnant nature. The Positive is negated by the
Negative and the Negative in turn is negated by the Positive: what,
then, is common to both and overlaps both? Denial, destruction,
passionate consumption of the Positive, even if this latter seeks slyly
to hide itself in the guise of the Negative. The Negative is justified
only as this ruthless negation, but as such it is absolutely justified,
for as such it is the action of the practical Spirit invisibly present
in the contradiction itself, the Spirit which, through this storm of
destruction, powerfully urges sinful, compromising souls to repentance
and announces its imminent coming, its imminent revelation in a really
democratic and universally human religion of freedom.
This self-resolution of the Positive is the only possible reconciliation
of the Positive with the Negative, for it is the immanent, total motion
and energy of the contradiction itself, and thus any other means of
reconciling them is arbitrary, and everyone who intends another
reconciliation merely proves in so doing that he is not permeated with
the Spirit of the times and thus is either stupid or unprincipled; for a
man is really intelligent and moral only if he surrenders himself
wholeheartedly to this Spirit and is permeated by it. Contradiction is
total and true —- the Compromisers themselves grant this —- but as total
it is wholly vital and the energy of its all-embracing vitality
consists, as we have already seen, just in this incessant
self-combustion of the Positive in the pure fire of the Negative.
What do the Compromisers do now? They grant us this whole thing; they
acknowledge the totality of contradiction just as we do, except that
they rob it, or rather want to rob it, of its motion, of its vitality,
of its whole soul, for the vitality of contradiction is a practical
power incompatible with their impotent half-souls, but by this fact
superior to their every attempt to stifle it. The Positive, as we have
said and demonstrated, has no justification if taken in itself; it is
justified only insofar as it negates the rest, the self-orientation of
the Negative; insofar as it unconditionally and determinately excludes
the Negative and thus maintains it in its activity — thus far it becomes
actively negative. This activity of negation to which the Positivists
are raised through the unsurmountable power of contradiction invisibly
present in every living being and which constitutes their only
justification and the only characteristic of their vitality — it is just
this activity of negation which the Compromisers want to prohibit them.
As a consequence of a singular incomprehensible misfortune, or rather
from the whole comprehensible misfortune of their practical lack of
principle, their practical impotence, they acknowledge in the Positive
just that which is dead within themselves, rotten, and worthy only of
destruction — and they reject that which constitutes their whole
vitality: the vital fight with the Negative, the vital presence in them
of contradiction.
They say to the Positives: Gentlemen, you are right in approving the
rotted and withered remains of conventionality; one lives so prettily
and comfortably in these ruins, in this irrational rococo world whose
air is as healthful for our consumptive souls as the air of a cow barn
is for consumptive bodies. So far as we are concerned, we would have
settled ourselves in your world with the greatest pleasure, a world
where not reason and the reasonable determination of the human will, but
long existence and immobility are the measure of the true and the holy,
and where consequently China, with its mandarins and its bamboo sticks,
must obtain as absolute truth. But what can we do, Gentlemen? The times
are bad; our common enemies, the Negatives, have won much ground. We
hate them as much as and perhaps even more than you do yourselves,
since, in their lack of restraint, they permit themselves to scorn us;
but they have become powerful and one must willy-nilly be mindful of
them in order not to be wholly destroyed by them. So don’t be so
fanatical, Gentlemen; grant them a little space in your society. What
matters it to you if they succeed in your[2] historical museum to some
ruins which, though very venerable, yet are wholly fallen into decay?
Believe us, entirely pleased by the honor which you thus render them,
they will conduct themselves very quietly and discreetly in your
honorable society, for, in the end, they are but young people who,
‘embittered by poverty and a lack of carefree conditions,’ shout and
make so much noise only because they hope thus to obtain a certain
importance and a comfortable place in society.
Then they turn to the Negatives and say to them: your endeavor is
honorable, Gentlemen. We understand your youthful enthusiasm for pure
principles and we have the greatest sympathy for you, but, believe us,
pure principles in their purity are not applicable to life; life
requires a certain dose of eclecticism, the world cannot be conquered as
you wish to do it, you must yield something in order to be able to mold
it; otherwise you will wholly damage your position in it. And, as one
tells of the Polish Jews, that in the last Polish war they wanted at the
same time to serve both warring parties, the Poles as well as the
Russians, and were hanged by both, so these poor souls vex themselves
with the impossible business of external reconciliation, and for thanks
are despised by both parties. It is too bad that present times are too
weak and too listless to apply the Law of Solon to them!
People will reply: these are mere phrases. The Compromisers are mostly
honest and scientifically educated people. There are a great many
universally esteemed and highly placed persons among them, and you have
presented them as unintelligent and unprincipled men! But what can I do
about it, since it is so true? I do not want to attack anyone
personally; the inner man is for me an inviolable sanctuary, something
incommensurable, on which I shall never permit myself a judgment; this
inner core can have infinite worth for the individual himself, but for
the world it is real only insofar as it expresses itself and it is only
that which does express itself. Every man is really only what he is in
the real world, and you surely don’t expect me to say that black is
white.
Yes, people will retort, their endeavor seems to be black to you, or
rather grey; but in fact the Compromisers want and aim only at progress
and they further it far more than you do yourself, for they go to work
prudently and not excessively as do the Democrats who want to blast the
whole world to pieces. But we have seen what such people imagine the
progress intended by the Compromisers to be; we have seen that the
Compromisers want nothing else but the stifling of the only vital
principle of our present time, otherwise so poor: the stifling of the
creative and pregnant principle of resolving motion. They perceive just
as we do that our time is a time of contradiction. They grant us that
this is an evil, internally torn condition, but, instead of letting it
turn over into a new, affirmative, and organic reality through the
completion of the contradiction, they want, by means of an endless
gradation, to preserve it eternally in its present shabby and
consumptive state. Is that progress? They say to the Positives: ‘Hang on
to the old, but permit the Negatives at the same time to resolve it
gradually.’ And to the Negatives: ‘Destroy the old, but not all at once
and completely, so that you will always have something to do. I.e., each
of you remain in your one-sidedness, but we, the elect, will prove the
pleasure of totality for ourselves.’ Wretched totality with which only
wretched souls can be satisfied! They rob contradiction of its moving,
practical soul and rejoice that they can command it arbitrarily. The
great present-day contradiction is not for them the practical power to
which every vital man must ruthlessly surrender himself in order to
remain vital, but only a theoretical toy. They are not permeated by the
practical Spirit of the times, and hence they are also immoral men. Yes,
they who so glory in their morality are immoral men, for morality is
impossible outside the religion of free humanity which alone brings
heavenly joy. One must repeat to them what the author of the Apocalypse
said to the Compromisers of his own day:
I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert
cold or hot.
But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to
vomit thee out of my mouth.
Because thou sayest: I am rich, and made wealthy, and have need of
nothing: and knowest not, that thou art wretched, and miserable, and
poor, and blind, and naked.[3]
But, people will say to me, are you not, with your irreconcilable
extremes, relapsing into the abstract position long ago refuted by
Schelling and Hegel? Did not Hegel, whom you value so highly, himself
make the quite correct observation that just as little can be seen in
pure light as in pure darkness, and that only the concrete unity of the
two makes vision possible at all? And does not Hegel’s greatest service
consist in his having demonstrated how every vital existence is vital
only because it has negation not outside itself but within itself as an
immanent condition necessary to its vitality; and how, if it were only
positive and had its negation outside itself, it would be motionless and
lifeless? I know that very well, Gentlemen! I grant you that a vital
organism, for instance, is vital only in that it carries the germ of
death within it. But if you want to quote Hegel to me, then you must
quote him in full. Then you will observe that the Negative is the
condition necessary for the life of this particular organism only so
long as it is present in it merely as a dialectical phase asserted in
that phase’s totality; that there comes a point, however, when the
gradual effect of the Negative is suddenly interrupted in such a manner
that the Negative is transformed into an independent principle, and this
moment is the death of this particular organism, a dialectical phase
which in Hegelian philosophy is characterized as the transition of
nature into a qualitatively new world, into the free world of Spirit.
The same is repeated in history. The principle of theoretical freedom,
for instance, already made itself felt in the deceased Catholic world
from the start of that world’s existence; this principle was the source
of all heresies in which Catholicism was so rich. But without this
principle Catholicism would have been motionless, and so it was at the
same time the principle of its vitality, though only so long as the
principle was maintained in its totality as pure dialectical phase.
Protestantism also arose gradually: it had its beginning in the
beginning of Catholicism itself; but once this gradualness was
interrupted, the principle of theoretical freedom raised itself to a
self-sustaining, independent principle. Then the contradiction was
revealed in its purity for the first time, and you well know, Gentlemen,
you who call yourselves Protestants, what Luther answered to the
Compromisers of his day as they offered their services to him.
You see, my view of the nature of contradiction is susceptible not only
of logical, but also of historical corroboration. But I know that no
proof will avail since, in your lifelessness, you undertake no
occupation so willingly as the mastery of history. It is not for nothing
that you have come to be called dry arrangers.
‘We are not yet defeated,’ the Compromisers will probably reply to me.
‘All that you say about contradiction may be true, but there is just one
thing we cannot grant you, namely, that things are now, in our time, so
bad as you maintain. Of course, there are contradictions in the present
day, but they are not so dangerous as you assert. Look, there is
tranquility everywhere, everywhere movement has subsided. No one thinks
of war, and the majority of nations and of men now strain every nerve to
preserve peace, for they well know that the material interests which
today appear to have become the main concern of politics and of
universal culture cannot be promoted without peace. How many important
inducements to war and to the dissolution of the present order of things
have there not been since the July Revolution! In the course of these
twelve years there have been such entanglements that no one could
possibly have expected them to be peacefully unraveled; moments when a
universal war seemed almost inevitable and when the most fearful storms
threatened us; and yet all difficulties were gradually resolved, all
remained quiet, and peace seems to have established itself on earth for
ever.’
Peace, you say. Yes, what is now called peace. I maintain in reply,
however, that contradictions have never been so sharply presented as
now, that the eternal contradiction, which is the same at all times
except that it increases in intensity and develops itself ever more in
the course of history, that this contradiction of freedom and unfreedom
has advanced and soared to its last and highest summit in our time,
otherwise a time so similar to the period of dissolution of the heathen
world. Have you not read the mysterious and awesome words, Liberté,
Égalité and Fraternité on the foreground of the Temple of Freedom
erected by the Revolution? And do you not know and feel that these words
intimate the complete annihilation of the present political and social
world? Have you heard nothing of the storms of the revolution, and do
you not know that Napoleon, this so-called tamer of Democracy, diffused
its leveling principles over all of Europe, like a worthy son of the
Revolution? Have you not also perhaps heard something of Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel, or do you really know nothing of a philosophy
which established the same leveling revolutionary principle in the
intellectual world —- namely, the principle of the autonomy of Spirit?
And do you not comprehend that this principle stands in the highest
contradiction to all current positive religions, to all present-day
churches?
‘Yes,’ you will answer, ‘but these contradictions belong to past
history; the Revolution was most recently subdued in France itself by
the wise reign of Louis-Philippe, and modern philosophy by one of its
greatest originators, by Schelling himself. Contradiction is now
everywhere dissolved, in all spheres of life.’ And do you really believe
in this dissolution, in this subjugation of the Spirit of revolution?
Are you then blind and deaf and have you no eyes or ears for what goes
on around you? No, Gentlemen, the Spirit of revolution is not subdued,
it has only gone back into itself again, after having convulsed the
whole world in its foundations by its first appearance; it has only sunk
into itself in order soon to reveal itself again as an affirmative,
creative principle, and right now it is burrowing —- if I may avail
myself of this expression of Hegel’s — like a mole under the earth. And
that it is not working for nothing you can see from the many ruins with
which our religious, political, and social flooring is covered. You
speak of resolution, of reconciliation! Just look around you and tell me
what has remained alive of the old Catholic and Protestant world. You
speak of the subjugation of the Negative principle! Have you read
nothing of Strauss, Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, and do you not know that
their works are in everyone’s hands? Do you not see that the whole of
German literature, books, brochures, newspapers, indeed, the works of
the Positivists themselves, are unwittingly and unwillingly permeated by
this negative Spirit? And you call this reconciliation and peace!
You well know that humanity, owing to its high calling, can be satisfied
and pacified only by the adoption of a universally practical principle,
by a principle which intensely concentrates within itself the thousand
different manifestations of spiritual life. But where is this principle,
Gentlemen? You must surely now and then experience vital, human moments
during the course of your existence, otherwise so dismal; moments when
you cast aside the petty concerns of your daily life and yearn for the
true, for the noble, for the holy. Answer me honestly, now, your hand on
your heart, have you ever anywhere found something vital? Have you ever
discovered under the ruins which surround us this world you long for,
where you could wholly surrender yourselves and be once more born anew
in this great communion with all humanity? Is this world perchance
Protestantism? But Protestantism is abandoned to the most ghastly
anarchy: into how many different sects is it not rendered? ‘Without
great, universal enthusiasm there are only sects and no public idiom,’
says Schelling; but the current Protestant world is as far from being
permeated with a general enthusiasm as heaven is from earth; it is
rather the most prosaic world one can imagine, Well, then, is it
perchance Catholicism? But where is Catholicism’s ancient splendor? Has
Catholicism, which formerly ruled over the whole world, now not become
an obedient tool of an alien, immoral policy? Or do you perhaps find
your peace of mind in the contemporary state? Yes, that would really be
a fine peace of mind! The state is currently in the throes of the
deepest internal conflict, for without religion, without a powerful
universal conviction, the state is impossible. Just look at France and
England if you want to convince yourselves of this; I shall not say
anything about Germany!
Finally, study yourselves, Gentlemen, and tell me honestly, are you
pleased with yourselves, and can you be pleased with yourselves? Are you
not, without exception, dismal and shabby appearances of our dismal and
shabby times ? Are you not full of conflicts? Are you whole men? Do you
really believe in anything? Do you really know what you want and can you
want anything at all? Has modern speculation, the epidemic of our time,
left a single sound part in you, and are you not permeated by this
disease and paralysed and broken by it? In fact, Gentlemen, you must
confess that our times are dismal times and that we are all its still
more dismal children!
On the other hand, however, visible appearances are stirring around us,
indicating that the Spirit, this old mole, has brought its underground
work to completion and that it will soon come again to pass judgment.
Everywhere, especially in France and England, social and religious
societies are being formed, wholly alien to the present political world,
societies which derive their life from new sources quite unknown to us
and develop and diffuse themselves in silence. The people, the poor
class, which without doubt constitutes the greatest part of humanity;
the class whose rights have already been recognized in theory; which,
however, up to now is still condemned by its birth, by its ties with
poverty and ignorance, as well, indeed, as with actual slavery —- this
class, which constitutes the true people, is everywhere assuming a
threatening attitude and is beginning to count the ranks of its enemy,
weak as compared to it, and to demand the actualization of the rights
already conceded to it by everyone. All peoples and all men are filled
with a kind of premonition, and everyone whose vital organs are not
paralysed faces with shuddering expectation the approaching future which
will speak out the redeeming word. Even in Russia, in this endless and
snow-covered kingdom which we know so little and which perhaps a great
future awaits, even in Russia dark clouds are gathering, heralding
storm. Oh, the air is sultry and filled with lightning.
And therefore we call to our deluded brothers: Repent, repent, the
Kingdom of the Lord is at hand!
To the Positivists we say: open the eyes of your mind; let the dead bury
the dead, and convince yourselves at last that the Spirit, ever young,
ever newborn, is not to be sought in fallen ruins! And we exhort the
Compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their
wretched and blind wisdom, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the
servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyses their movements.
Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates
only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all
life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.
[1] ’ ... in sich nichts hat, was es negieren konnte’ — does Bakunin
perhaps mean ‘that it could negate it? — TRANS.
[2] Reading ‘Ihrem’ for ‘ihrem’ — TRANS.
[3] Rev. 3:15–17 — TRANS.