Dear Eugene:
Johannes Scherr relates in the "Gartenlaube," a German family paper, in
an article entitled "Mahomet and His Work," that insane doctrinarians
are searching for people without religion. This has not succeeded, it is
said, although the spark of religious feeling is glowing very dimly in
peoples that are close to the animal. But nevertheless, he continues,
the expressions of religious feeling mark the boundary line where the
beast ceases and man begins. For just as in the higher stages of
civilization religion means the consciousness of the finite of being one
with the infinite, so in the lower stages of civilization the indefinite
impulse is felt by man to connect his special nature with the universal
nature and bring them into harmony. This is idealism, the idealistic
need. It is obvious that, and why, the people have always and everywhere
sought and found satisfaction for their idealistic longings in religion.
But, adds the shrewd observer, I must remark that I do not refer to the
shifting population when I say "people," for sad to relate, that
population is torn away from all connection with natural conditions. I
refer to the "settled, the permanent, the true people."
This quotation shows that a champion of the "true people" is in conflict
with true logic. In dividing a population into shifting and settled
people, one should retain as a basis the logical consciousness that all
classes of people are embraced by one class; furthermore, that human,
monkey, ant, and other nations are parts of the one and the same nation;
until finally man and animal, real and imaginary, with all religious and
godless things, are ultimately fused in the world unit and can never be
"torn away from all connection with natural conditions."
All distinctions must logically be based on the consciousness of the
absolute and universal unity, of the interconnection of all things. For
this reason some pious people, with their God in whom everything is
living and has its being, have more logic than some freethinkers of the
class of Johannes Scherr who have no coherence in their method of
thought. The faithful think more logically than the narrowly skeptical,
for they begin and end with God. But still they cannot think quite
logically, because they cannot establish any logical connection between
their eternally perfect Lord and evil, the devil, disease, misery, sin,
in short all the sufferings and vanities here below.
The unit of nature, the infinite, is the quintessence of logic. Neither
natural science in the narrow sense of the word, nor metaphysics, nor
formal logic, can give any clue as to the nature of this thing of
things. This can be done only by a science of understanding which
recognizes matter and mind and all opposites and contradictions as
formalities of the universe. How can a man who is out of touch with the
mass of the shifting population feel that he is one with the universe?
Whoever regards any special class as the true people, has no
understanding either of the common people or of the absolute universe.
Proletarian logic teaches not only the equality of all human beings, but
universal equality. And mark well, this universal equality does not
conflict with variety any more than a variety of pots and jugs conflicts
with the unity of vessels, or the manifold forms of bretzels and rolls
with the unity of bakery ware.
The enemies of democratic development, in attacking the idea of freedom
and equality, point to the manifoldness of nature, the individual
differences of men, the distinctions between weak and strong, wise and
fools, men and women, and consider it tyranny to attempt to equalize
that which nature has made different. They cannot understand that like
things may be different and different things alike. They are blinded by
their class logic which sees only the differences, but not the unity,
not the transfusion of all classes.
Class logic teaches that contradictory things cannot exist. According to
it, a thing cannot be genuine and false at the same time. This class
logic has a narrow conception of existence. It has only observed that
there are many different things in nature, but has overlooked the fact
that all these things have also a general nature. We, on the other hand,
recognize that every thing, every person, is a part of the infinite
world and partakes of its general nature, is eternal and perishable,
true and untrue, great and small, one sided and manyfold, in short
contradictory.
Before and after Socrates, philosophy and religion have searched for the
genuine, right, good, true, and beautiful, but have reached no
harmonious results. But it cannot be denied that in the course of the
centuries the problem has become clearer and clearer. The great names of
Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Cartesius, Spinoza,
Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, are milestones on the highway of this progress.
The evolution is apparent, but the interrelation between the
intellectual and physical, and especially between intellectual and
economic evolution, is much ignored. The bridge between mind and body
was not found, and philosophical evolution has been regarded up to our
day as a purely mental process accomplished by one or two dozen of
famous brains. I wish to point out to you now, that proletarian logic is
the continuation of the preceding research after the genuine, true,
good, and beautiful. It teaches how to conceive of these ideals
logically, and it has not so much proceeded from any one talented
brain, but is rather the product of the entire cosmic process.
Philosophical brains have developed the science of logical thought only
to the extent that the material development of the world has stimulated
them to do so. You must regard the human brains only as secondary levers
of the universal lever which is not only genuine, true, good, and
beautiful, but truth, goodness, and beauty itself, or the world and the
absolute.
The understanding of the absolute which is called "good Lord," and then
again "the bad world," in other words the selfsufficient cosmos, is very
inconvenient to the wisdom of the professors, and they are attempting to
assign it to a special study which they call "metaphysics." This
division of labor is not introduced for the purpose of making research
more productive, but of surrounding this study by mysterious darkness.
The professors who lecture to the young people on formal logic set aside
the ancient research after the true, the good, the beautiful, and try to
place these ideals outside of the light of science in order to be able
to preserve them unchanged in the tabernacle of faith.
This charge may seem unjust, because the learned gentlemen reserved a
corner for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their metaphysical
department. But there is something peculiar about this. The great Kant
has asked the plain question: "Is metaphysics practicable as a science?"
Answer: No! The transcendental truth, etc., sought by metaphysics, and
named God, freedom, immortality in Christian language, cannot be found
by any reason. But being a child of his time, the great philosopher
makes a small concession to the transcendental.
He teaches: Although transcendental truth cannot be located
scientifically, still the religious faith in its existence is wholesome.
We, in our time, think more soberly about this theory of salvation and
accept the elimination of all transcendentalism from science. While the
spokesmen of the "true people" would like to hide their exalted truth,
freedom, and immortality behind the curtains of temples, we throw the
full daylight of logic on the absolute truth, goodness, and beauty of
the material world.
Logic as the science of correct thought cannot be restricted to any one
object, it cannot exclude any object, whether terrestrial or heavenly,
from its sphere. The great lights of present day learning do not wish to
subordinate the intellect as the object of the logical department, and
absolute truth as the object of the metaphysical department, to one
another, but to co-ordinate them side by side.
But two co-ordinated things which are not subordinated to a third higher
thing lack logic, and the brain which is satisfied by such a condition
suffers from disorder. Logical truth must inevitably be a part of
absolute truth, and it is our duty to remove absolute truth from the
field of metaphysics, of transcendentalism, and to transfer it to the
sober world which forms an inseparable unit with the human mind.
So much for the proletarian duty to continue the research after the
true, the good, and the beautiful which was the object of the
philosophers before and after Socrates. But remember that I am referring
only to the truly good, beautiful, etc., which is contained in the
universal truth of all true specifications. The question of the
ethically good, the esthetically beautiful and the absolutely perfect is
as necessarily contained in the question of the universal truth as red,
blue, and green in the rainbow, of course only in an abstract sense.
Our logic which has for its object the truth of the universe, is the
science of the understanding of the universe, a science of universal
understanding or conception of the world. It teaches that the
interrelation of all things is truth and life, is the genuine, right,
good, and beautiful. All the sublime moving the heart of man, all the
sweet stirring his breast, is the universal nature or the universe. But
the vexing question still remains: What about the negative, the ugly,
the evil, what about error, pretense, standstill, disease, death, and
the devil?
True, the world is vain, evil, ugly. But these are merely accidental
phenomena, only forms and appendages of the world. Its eternity, truth,
goodness, beauty, is substantial, existing, positive. Its negative is
like the darkness which serves to make the light more brilliant, so that
it may overcome the dark and shine so much more brightly.
The spokesmen of the ruling classes are not open for such a sublime
optimism, because they have the pessimistic duty of perpetuating misery
and servitude.