As a father cares for his child, so an author cares for his product. I
may be able to give a little additional zest to the contents of this
work by adding an explanation how I came to write it.
Although born by my mother in 1828, I did not enter my own world until
"the mad year," 1848. I was learning the trade of my father in my
paternal shop, when I saw in the "Koelnische Zeitung," how the people of
Berlin had overcome the King of Prussia and conquered "liberty." This
"liberty" now became the first object of my musings. The parties of that
period, the disturbers and howlers, made a great deal of fuss about it.
But the more I heard about it, and hence became enthusiastic over it,
the duller, hazier and more indistinct became the meaning of it, so that
it turned things upside down in my head. The psychologists have long
known that enthusiasm for a cause and understanding of that cause are
two different things. Mark, for instance, the zeal displayed by Catholic
peasants in singing their mass, although they do not understand a word
of Latin.
What is meant by political freedom? What is its beginning, what its end?
Where and how are we to find a positive and definite knowledge of it? In
the parties of the middle, the so-called "constitutionals," as well as
among the bourgeois democrats, there was no end of dissension. Nothing
could be learned there. Among them, as among the Protestants, every one
was a chosen interpreter of the gospel.
However, the papers of the extremes, that is, the "Neue Preussische"
with its "For God, King and Fatherland," and the "Neue Rheinische," the
organ of "Democracy," gave me a hint that liberty had some sort of a
material basis. During the following years, my life in rural
surroundings gave me leisure to follow this scent. On one side, it was
the work of men like Gerlach, Stahl, and Leo, on the other of Marx and
Engels, that gave me a foothold.
Though the communists and the ultra-conservatives came to widely
different conclusions, still I felt and read between the lines that both
of these extreme parties based their demands on one fundamental premise.
They knew what they wanted; they both had a definite beginning and end.
And that permitted the assumption that both had a common philosophy. The
Prussian landholding aristocracy based the cross, which they wore as an
emblem on their hats, on the historically acquired royal military power
and on the positive divine revelation of the Bible printed in black and
supported by the ecclesiastical police force dressed in black. And the
Communist point of departure was quite as positive, unquestionable and
material, viz., the growing supremacy of the mass of the people with
their proletarian interests based on the historically acquired
productive power of the working class. The spirit of both of these
hostile camps was descending from the results of philosophy, primarily
from the Hegelian school. Both of them were armed with the
philosophical achievements of the century, which they had not only
mechanically assimilated, but rather continually provided with fresh
food like a living being.
In the beginning of the fifties, a pamphlet was published by one of the
cross bearers, Stahl, entitled "Against Bunsen." This Bunsen was at the
time the Prussian Embassador at London, a crony of the ruling Prussian
King Frederic William IV., and, apart from this, nothing but a liberal
muddle head who was interested in political and religious tolerance.
The pamphlet of the cross bearer Stahl attacked this tolerance and
demonstrated valiantly that tolerance could be preached only by a
muddled free lance to whom religion and fatherland were indifferent
conceptions. Religious faith, so far as it is truth, so he said, has a
true power and can transpose mountains. Such a faith could not be
tolerant and indifferent, but must push its propaganda with fire and
sword.
In the same way in which Stahl defended the interests of the landed
aristocracy, the philosopher Feuerbach spoke in the interest of the
infidel revolutionaries. Both of them were to that extent in accord with
the "Communist Manifesto" that they no longer regarded Liberty as a
phantasmagoria, but as a being of flesh and blood.
When I had realized this, it dawned upon me that any conception
elucidated by philosophy, in this case the idea of liberty, had this
peculiarity: Liberty is as yet an abstract idea. In order to become
real, it must assume a concrete, special form.
Political freedom as a glittering generality is a thing of no reality.
Under such fantastic ideal the constitutionalists or the liberals
conceal the liberty of the money bag. Under these circumstances, they
are quite right in demanding German unity with Prussia as a head, or a
republic with a grand duke at the top. The landed aristocracy also are
right in demanding the liberty of that aristocracy. And the Communists
are still more right, for they demand the liberty that will guarantee
bread and butter for the mass of the people and will fully set free all
the forces of production.
From this experience and conclusion it follows that true liberty and the
highest right are composed of individual liberties and rights, that are
opposed to one another without being inconceivable. It is easy to
proceed from this premise to the rule of thought laid down in this work,
that the brain need not make any excursions into the transcendental in
order to find his way through the contradictions of the real world.
In this way I passed from politics to philosophy, and from philosophy to
the theory of positive knowledge which I presented to the public in 1869
in my little work "The Nature of Human Brain Work." Further studies on
the general powers of understanding have added to my special knowledge
of this subject, so that I am now enabled to fill the old wine into a
new bottle instead of publishing a new edition of my old work.
The science which I present in the following pages is very limited in
its circumference, but all the better founded and important in its
consequences. This, I trust, will be accepted as a sufficient excuse for
the recurring repetition of the same statements in a different form. My
remaining confined to a single point requires no apology. What is left
undone by one, is bequeathed as a problem to others.
There might be some dispute over the question, how much of this positive
achievement of philosophy is due to the author and to his predecessors.
But that is an interminable task of small concern. No matter who hoisted
the calf out of the well, so long as it is out. Anyway, this whole work
treats of the concatenation and interdependence of things, and this also
throws a bright light on the question of mine and thine.