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Title: The Anarchistic Devil Author: Stephen Edred Flowers Date: 1997 Language: en Topics: atheism, civilization, God, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, materialism, Mikhail Bakunin, spirituality Source: Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent
“If God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him.”
― Mikail Bakunin
In his fragmentary work, God and the State, the Russian anarchist
Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) at one point assesses humanity in terms of
the Edenic myth and says: “[Satan] makes man ashamed of his bestial
ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the
seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the
fruit of knowledge.” [1] As Bakunin saw it, humanity—as an essentially
bestial creature—was “endowed in a higher degree than the animals of any
other species with two precious faculties—the power to think and the
desire to rebel.” His understanding of humanity—his anthropology—held
that collectively and individually the development of man was
characterized by three principles: human animality, thought and
rebellion.
For Bakunin Satan is “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and
emancipator of worlds.”[2] Like most anarchists who derive much of their
theory from Roussseau’s idea of the “noble savage,” civilization and its
institutions are the chief evils in the world. They must be struck down
so that the innate nobility of humanity may emerge as a matter of
natural course once freed of all socially determined conventions.
Bakunin was himself more an activist revolutionary than a writer or
philosopher—he said “I have no system, I am a seeker.” He is said to
have had a love for the mysterious and the irrational. This put him at
odds with those he called “doctrinaire communists” who followed the more
systematic philosophy of Marx. Both of these philosophies are, however,
based on a positivistic materialism. “God” was firmly identified with
the idea of “spirit,” so the Devil, God’s opposite, must be—if we choose
to use this language—tantamount to the idea of matter. The property of
“intelligence” can be ascribed to matter due to its “dynamic nature and
evolutionary quality,” according to Bakunin.[3]
This dichotomizing of “matter” and “spirit” (or “intelligence”) is, of
course, typical of the modern era. Where such dichotomies can be
generated one must be accepted, the other rejected, or so goes
conventional thought. All this is modern, all-too-modern. From a
left-hand path perspective it is perhaps interesting to remember that
ancient Hebrew mythology identified as “Satanic” both the existence of
the flesh (nature/matter) and the presence of intelligence (as a result
of rebellion).
While the ideas of Bakunin lived on in a vague obscurity—and continue to
do so today among all those who oppose authority in all its forms—the
ideas of Marx have had a much more doctrinaire and institutionalized
history. This history was to be played out not in the industrialized
capitalist strongholds of western Europe but in the still largely
feudalistic, pre-industrial Russia.
[1] Michael Bakunin, God and the State (New York: Dover, 1970), p. 10.
[2] Bakunin, God and the State, p. 10.
[3] Bakunin, God and the State, pp. 12–13.