MORALS AND LAW
_Eternal Truths._
We refrain from offering examples of the hodge podge of stupidity and
sham solemnity with which Herr Duehring regales his readers for fifty
full pages as fundamental knowledge on the elements of consciousness.
We merely quote the following: "He who merely conceives of thought
through the medium of speech has never understood what is signified by
abstract and true thought." Hence, animals are the most abstract and
true thinkers, for their thought is never obscured by the importunate
interference of speech. With regard to Herr Duehring's thought in
particular, it may be perceived that they are but little suited to
speech and that the German language in particular is quite inadequate
to express them.
The fourth part of his book, however, possesses some redeeming
features, for here and there it offers us some comprehensible notions
on the subject of morals and law in spite of the tedious and involved
rhetoric. Right at the beginning we are invited to take a journey to
the other heavenly bodies. Thus, the elements of morality are to be
found among superhuman beings among whom exist an understanding of
things and a regular system of the harmonious conduct of life. Our
share in such conclusions must then be small, but there always remains
a beneficent and enlarging idea in picturing that even in other
spheres individual and social life follows one purpose which cannot
be escaped or evaded by any intelligent living creature.
There is good reason for our altering the position of the statement
that Herr Duehring's truth is good for all possible worlds from the
close to the beginning of the chapter. When once the correctness of
Herr Duehring's notions of morals and law have been established so as
to apply to all world the beneficent notion may easily be extended to
all time. Here again, however, we run across another final truth of
last instance. The moral universe has "just as well as that of
universal knowledge its general principles and simple elements." Moral
principles are beyond history and the national distinctions of to-day
... the various truths from which in the course of development the
fuller moral consciousness, and, so to speak, conscience itself is
derived, can, as far as their origin is investigated, claim a similar
acceptation and extent to that of mathematics and its applications.
Real truths are immutable and it is folly to conceive of correct
knowledge as liable to the attacks of time or of change in material
conditions. "Hence the certainty of sound knowledge and the
sufficiency of general acceptation forbid to doubt the absolute
correctness of the fundamental principles of knowledge.... Continual
doubt is in itself an evidence of weakness and is merely the
expression of a barren condition of confusion, which although
conscious of possessing nothing still seeks to maintain the appearance
of holding on to something. Regarding morals, it denies universal
principles with respect to the manifold variations in moral ideas
owing to geographical and historical conditions, and thinks that with
the admission of the unavoidable necessity of evil and wickedness
there is no need for it to acknowledge the truth and efficiency of
moral impulses. This mordant scepticism which is not directed against
any false doctrine in particular, but against human capacity to
recognise morality resolves itself finally into nothingness, it is no
more than mere nihilism. It flatters itself that it can attain
supremacy and give free rein to unprincipled pleasures by destroying
moral ideas and creating chaos. It is greatly deceived, however, if
merely pointing at the inevitable fate of the intellect with respect
to error and truth is sufficient to show by analogy that natural
liability to error does not exclude the arriving at a correct decision
but rather tends to that end."
Up to now we have not commented upon Herr Duehring's pompous opinions
on final truths of the last instance, sovereignty of the will,
absolute certainty of knowledge, and so forth, until the matter could
first be brought to an issue. Up to this point the investigation has
been useful to show how far the separate assertions of the philosophy
of realism had "sovereign validity" and "unrestricted claim to truth"
but we now come to the question if any and what product of human
knowledge can have in particular "sovereign validity" and
"unrestricted claims to truth." If I speak of human knowledge I do not
do so as an affront to the dwellers in other worlds whom I have not
the honor to know, but only because animals have knowledge also, not
sovereign, however. The dog recognises a divinity in his master, who
may, however, be a great fool.
"Is human thought sovereign?" Before we can answer "yes" or "no" we
must first examine what human thought is. Is it the thought of an
individual man? No. It exists only as the individual thoughts of many
millions of men, past, present and to come. If I now say, having
comprehended the thought of all men in the future also under my
concept, that it is able to understand the entire universe, if man
only lasts long enough, and the organs of perception are unlimited,
and the objects to be comprehended have no limits upon their
comprehensibility, my statement is banal and barren. The most valuable
result of such a conclusion would be to cause in us a tremendous
distrust of present day knowledge. Because, to all appearance, we are
just standing at the threshold of human history and the generations
which will correct us will be much more numerous than those whose
knowledge--often with little enough regard,--we ourselves correct.
Herr Duehring himself explains the necessity of consciousness,
knowledge and perception only becoming apparent in a collection of
separate individuals. We can only apply the word sovereignty to the
thought of these individuals in so far as we do not know of any force
which can defeat thought. But we all know that there is no
significance to nor power of interpretation of the sovereign power of
the knowledge of the thought of each individual, and, according to our
experience, there is much more that requires improvement and
correction in it than not.
In other words, the sovereignty of thought is realised in a number of
highly unsovereign men capable of thinking, the knowledge which has
unlimited pretensions to truth is realised in a number of relative
blunders; neither the one nor the other can be fully realised except
through an endless eternity of human existence.
We have here again the same contradiction as above between the
necessary, as an absolute conceived characteristic of human thought,
and its reality in the very limited thinking single individual, a
contradiction which can only be solved in the endless progression of
the human race, that is endless as far as we are concerned. In this
sense human thought is just as sovereign as not--sovereign, and its
possibility of knowledge just as unlimited as limited. It is sovereign
and unlimited as regards its nature, its significance, its
possibilities, its historical end, it is not sovereign and limited
with respect to individual expression and its actuality at any
particular time.
It is just the same with eternal truths. If mankind only operated with
eternal truths and with thought which possessed a sovereign
significance and unlimited claims to truth, mankind would have arrived
at a point where the eternity of thought becomes realised in actuality
and possibility. Thus the famous miracle of the enumerated innumerable
would be realised.
But what about those truths which are so well established that to
doubt them is to be, as it were, crazy? That twice two is four, that
the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that
Paris is in France, that a man will die of hunger if he does not
receive food, etc.? Do we not perceive then that there are eternal
truths, final truths of last instance? Quite so. We can divide the
entire field of knowledge in the old-fashioned way into three great
divisions. The first includes all the sciences which are concerned
with inanimate nature and which can be treated mathematically, more or
less--mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, physics and chemistry. If one
like to use big words to express simple things, it may be said that
certain results of these sciences are eternal truths, final truths of
last instance, whence they are called the exact sciences. But all the
results are by no means of this character. With the introduction of
variable quantities and the extension of the variability to the
infinitely small and the infinitely large, mathematics, otherwise
erect, meets with its fall, it has eaten of the apple of knowledge and
there has been opened up to it the path of limitless progress as well
as that of error. The virgin condition of absolute purity, the
undisturbable certainty of all mathematics has vanished forever, a
period of controversy has intervened, and we have now arrived at the
state of affairs in which most people carry on the operations of
multiplication and division not because they really understand what
they are engaged in, but from mere belief because the operation has so
far always given correct results. Astronomy and mechanics, physics and
chemistry are in a still more confused state, and hypotheses crowd one
another thick as a swarm of bees. It cannot be otherwise. In physics
we investigate the movements of molecules, in chemistry the
development of molecules from atoms, and if the theory of light waves
should not be correct we have no absolute knowledge that we even see
these interesting things. The lapse of time produces a very thin crop
of final truths of last instance. In geology we are in a still more
embarrassing situation for we are here involved in the study of
preceding epochs in which, as a matter of fact, neither we ourselves
nor any other human being ever existed. Here there is much labor spent
in the harvesting of truths of last instance, and they are a scanty
crop withal.
The second division of knowledge is occupied in the investigation of
living organisms. In this field the changes and causalities are so
complex that not only does the solution of each question bring about
the rise of an unlimited number of new questions, but the solution of
each of these separate new questions depends upon years, frequently
centuries, of investigation, and can then be only partially completed.
So that the need of systematic arrangement of the various
interrelations continually surrounds the final truths of the last
instance with a prolific and spreading growth of hypotheses. Look at
the long succession of progressive steps from Galen to Malpighi
necessary to establish correctly so simple a thing as the circulation
of the blood of mammals, yet how little we know of the origin of blood
corpuscles and how many mistakes we make in, for example, rationally
connecting the symptoms and cause of a disease. Besides there are
frequently discoveries like those of the cell which compel us to
entirely revise all hitherto firmly established truth of the last
instance in biology, and to lay numbers of such truths aside for good
and all. He who would therefore in this science undertake the
proclamation of absolute and immutable truths must be content with
such platitudes as the following: "All men must die; all female
mammals have mammary glands, etc." He will not even be able to say
that the greater animals digest their food by means of the stomach and
bowels and not with the head because the centralised system of nerves
in the head is not adapted to digestion.
But things are worse with regard to final truths of last instance in
the third group of sciences--the historical. These are concerned with
the conditions of human life, social conditions, forms of law and the
state with their idealistic superstructure of philosophy, religion,
art, etc., in their historic succession and in their present day
manifestations. In organic nature we have at least to do with a
succession of regular phenomena which regularly repeat themselves as
far as our immediate observation goes, within very wide limits.
Organic species have remained on the whole unaltered since the time of
Aristotle. In social history, on the other hand, repetitions of
conditions are the exception, not the rule, directly we leave behind
the prehistoric conditions of humanity, the stone-age, so-called.
Where such repetitions do occur, moreover, they never recur under
precisely similar conditions, as for example the occurrence of early
tribal communism among all peoples anterior to civilisation and the
form of its break up. As regards human history, then, as far as
science is concerned, we are at a greater disadvantage than in
biology. Furthermore, when the intimate relations existing between a
social and political phenomenon come to be recognised it is not, as a
rule, perceived until the conditions are actually on the way to decay.
Knowledge is therefore entirely relative, since it is limited to a
given people and a given epoch, and their nature under transitory
social and political forms, when it examines relations and forms
conclusions. He who therefore is after final truths of last instance,
pure and immutable, will only manage to catch flat phrases and the
most arrant commonplaces, like these--man cannot, generally speaking,
live without working; up to the present men have for the most part
been divided into masters and servants; Napoleon died on May 5th,
1821, and things of that sort.
It is worth noting that in this department of knowledge pretended
final truths of last instance are met with most frequently. Only the
person who wishes to show that there are eternal truth, eternal
morality, and eternal justice in human history, and that these are
similar in scope and application to those of mathematics, will
proclaim that twice two is four and that birds have beaks and the like
to be eternal truths. We can also certainly rely upon the same friend
of humanity taking the opportunity to explain that all former
inventors of eternal truths have been more or less asses or
charlatans, that they have been circumscribed by error and have made
mistakes. The fact of their error, however, is natural and proves the
existence of the truth, and that it can be reached, and the newly
arisen prophet has a ready-to-hand stock of final truths of last
instance, eternal law and eternal justice. This has happened hundreds,
nay, thousands of times, so that it is a wonder that men are still
sufficiently credulous to believe it not only of others, but even of
themselves. Here we find a prophet clad in the armour of righteousness
who proclaims in the old-fashioned way that whoever else may deny
there is still one left to declare final truths of last instance.
Denial, nay, doubt even, is a weakness, barren confusion, mole-like
scepticism, worse than blank nihilism, confusion worse confounded and
other little amiabilities of this sort. As with all prophets, there is
no scientific investigation, but merely off-hand condemnation.
We might have made mention of the sciences which investigate the laws
of human thought, logic and dialectics. Here we are, however, no
better off as regards eternal truths. Herr Duehring explains that the
dialectic proper is pure nonsense, and the many books which have been
and are still being written on logic prove clearly that final truths
of last instance are more sparsely distributed than many believe.
Moreover, we are not at all alarmed because the step of science upon
which we to-day stand is not a bit more final than any of the
preceding steps. Already it includes an immense amount of material for
investigation and offers a great chance for specialisation and study
to anyone who desires to become expert in any particular branch.
Whoever expects to find final and immutable truths in observations
which in the very nature of things must remain relative for successive
generations, and can only be completed piecemeal, as in cosmogony,
geology and human history, which must always be incomplete owing to
the complexity of the historical material, shows perverse ignorance
even where he does not, as in the present case, set up claims of
personal infallibility.
Truth and error, like all such mutually antagonistic concepts, have
only an absolute reality under very limited conditions, as we have
seen, and as even Herr Duehring should know by a slight acquaintance
with the first elements of dialectics, which show the insufficiency of
all polar antagonisms. As soon as we bring the antagonism of truth and
error out of this limited field it becomes relative and is not
serviceable for new scientific statements. If we should seek to
establish its reality beyond those limits we are at once confronted by
a dilemma, both poles of the antagonism come into conflict with their
opposite; truth becomes error and error becomes truth. Let us take,
for example, the well-known Boyle's law, according to which, the
temperature remaining the same, the volume of the gas varies as the
pressure to which it is subjected. Regnault discovered that this law
does not apply in certain cases. If he had been a realist-philosopher
he would have been obliged to say, "Boyle's law is mutable, therefore
it does not possess absolute truth, therefore it is untrue, therefore
it is false." He would thus have made a greater error than that which
was latent in Boyle's law, his little particle of truth would have
been drowned in a flood of error; he would in this way have elaborated
his correct result into an error compared with which Boyle's law with
its particle of error fastened to it would have appeared as the truth.
Regnault, scientist as he was, did not trouble himself with such
childish performances. He investigated further and found that Boyle's
law is only approximately correct, having no validity in the case of
gases which can be made liquid by pressure when the pressure
approaches the point where liquefaction sets in. Boyle's law therefore
is shown only to be true within specific bounds. But is it absolute, a
final truth of last instance within specific bounds? No physicist
would say so. He would say that it is correct for certain gases and
within certain limits of pressure and temperature, and even then
within these somewhat narrow limits he would not exclude the
possibility of a still narrower limitation or change in application as
the result of further investigation. This is how final truths of last
instance stand in physics, for example. Really scientific works as a
rule avoid such dogmatic expressions as truth and error, but they are
constantly cropping up in works like the Philosophy of Reality, where
mere loose talking vaunts itself the supreme result of sovereign
thought.
But a naive reader may say, "Where has Herr Duehring expressly stated
that the content of his philosophy of reality is final truth of the
last instance?" Well, for example, in his dithyramb on his system
which we quoted above, and again where he says "Moral truths as far as
they are known are as sound as those of mathematics." Does not Herr
Duehring explain that by reason of his powers of criticism and
searching investigations, the fundamental philosophy has been brought
to light and that he has thus bestowed upon us final truths of last
instance? But if Herr Duehring does not set up such a claim either on
his own behalf or that of his time, if he says that some time in the
misty future final truths of last instance will be established, and
that therefore his own statements are merely accidental and confused,
a kind of "mole-like scepticism" and "barren confusion," what is all
the fuss about, and what useful purpose is served by Herr Duehring?
If we gain no ground in the matter of truth and error we gain less in
respect of good and evil. Here we have an antagonism of ethical
significance, and ethics is a department of human history in which
final truths are but slight and few. From people to people, from age
to age, there have been such changes in the ideas of good and evil
that these concepts are contradictory in different periods and among
different peoples. But some one may remark, "Good is still not evil
and evil is not good; if good and evil are confused all morality is
abolished, and each may do what he will." When the rhetoric is
stripped away this is the opinion of Herr Duehring. But the matter is
not to be disposed of so easily. If things were as easy as that there
would be no dispute about good and evil. Everybody would know what was
good and what was evil. How is it to-day, however? What system of
ethics is preached to us to-day? There is first the Christian-feudal,
a survival of the early days of faith, which is as a matter of fact
subdivided into Catholic and Protestant, of which there are still
further subdivisions, from the Jesuit-Catholic and orthodox Protestant
to loosely drawn ethical systems. There figure also the modern or
bourgeois, and still further the proletarian future system of
morality, so that the progressive European countries alone present
three contemporaneous and coexistent actual theories of ethics. Which
is the true one? No single one of them, regarded as a finality, but
that system assuredly possesses the most elements of truth which
promises the longest duration, which existent in the present is also
involved in the revolution of the future, the proletarian.
But if we now see that the three classes of modern society, the feudal
aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletarian, have their
distinctive ethical systems, we can only conclude therefrom that
mankind consciously or unconsciously shapes its moral views in
accordance with the material facts upon which in the last instance the
class existence is based--upon the economic conditions under which
production and exchange are carried on.
But in the three above mentioned systems of ethics there is much which
is common to all three of them, and might not this at least constitute
a portion of an eternally stable system of ethics? These ethical
theories pass through three distinct steps in their historical
development, they have therefore a common historical basis and hence
necessarily much in common. Further, for approximately similar
economic stages there must, necessarily be a coincidence of similar
stages of economic development, and ethical theories must of necessity
coincide with a greater or less degree of closeness. From the very
moment when private property in movables developed there had to be
ethical sanctions of general effect in all communities in which
private property prevailed, thus: Thou shalt not steal. Is this
commandment, then, an eternal commandment? By no means. In a society
in which the motive for theft did not exist stealing would only be the
practice of the weak-minded, and the preacher of morals who proclaimed
"Thou shalt not steal" as an eternal commandment would only be laughed
at for his pains.
We here call attention to the attempt to force a sort of moral
dogmatism upon us as eternal, final, immutable moral law, upon the
pretext that the moral law is possessed of fixed principles which
transcend history and the variations of individual peoples. We state,
on the contrary, that up to the present time all ethical theory is in
the last instance a testimony to the existence of certain economic
conditions prevailing in any community at any particular time. And in
proportion as society developed class-antagonisms, morality became a
class morality and either justified the interests and domination of
the ruling class, or as soon as a subject class became strong enough
justified revolt against the domination of the ruling class and the
interests of the subject class. That, by this means, there is an
advance made in morals as a whole, just as there is in all other
branches of human knowledge, there can be no doubt. But we have not
yet advanced beyond class morals. Real human morality superior to
class morality and its traditions will not be possible until a stage
in human history has been reached in which class antagonisms have not
only been overcome but have been forgotten as regards the conduct of
life. Now the colossal egotism of Herr Duehring may be understood when
it is seen that, on the eve of a revolution which will bring about a
state of society devoid of classes, he claims from the midst of an old
and class divided society to proclaim an eternal system of morals
independent of time and material change. He himself declares what up
to the present has been hid from the rest of us that he understands
the structure of this future society at least as regards its salient
features.
In conclusion he makes a revelation which is essentially original but
none the less "fundamental respecting the origin of evil." We have the
fact that the type of the cat with its inherent treachery is pictured
as the representative animal type, and this also displays a form of
character to be found also in man. There is no mystery then about evil
if one can detect a mysticism in the cat or any other beast of prey.
Evil is--the cat. Goethe was evidently wrong when he introduced
Mephistopheles as a black dog instead of a cat similarly colored. This
is ethics suited not only to all worlds but to cats also.
_Equality._
By dint of experience we have come to learn Herr Duehring's "method."
It consists in separating each department of knowledge into what are
assumed to be its most simple elements, then of making so called self
evident axioms with regard to these simple elements, and thereupon
operating with the results obtained in this way. Thus a sociological
question is to be "decided on simple axiomatic principles just as if
it were a matter of elementary mathematics." Thus the application of
the mathematical method to history, ethics and law gives mathematical
certainty to the final results which appear as pure and immutable
truths.
This is only another form of the old ideological, _a priori_ method so
called, which learned the properties of an object not from the object
itself but derived them by proof from the concept of the object. First
you derive a concept of the object from the actual object, then you
turn the spit and measure the object in terms of its derivative the
concept. The concept is not shaped after the pattern of the object but
the object after the pattern of the concept. In Herr Duehring's
method, the simplest elements, the last abstractions to which he can
attain do duty for the concept which is unchangeable, the simplest
elements are under the best conditions purely imaginary in their
nature. The philosophy of realism hence appears to be mere ideology,
and has no derivation from real life but is absolutely dependent upon
the imagination. When such an ideologist proceeds to construct a
system of morals and law from his concept of the so-called simplest
elements of society instead of from the real social conditions of the
men about him, where does he get his material for construction? The
material evidently consists of two kinds--firstly, the slim vestiges
of reality which are still present in every fundamental abstraction,
and secondly in the actual content which our ideologist evolves from
his own consciousness. And what does he discover in his consciousness?
For the most part moral and ethical philosophic ideas and these
constitute an expression corresponding more or less closely, whether
positive or negative, harmonious or hostile, with the social and
political conditions which environ him. Besides he probably has
notions derived from literature pertaining to these conditions, and
finally he has possibly personal idiosyncrasies. Let our ideologist
dodge all that he can, the historical reality which he has thrown out
of doors comes in again at the window and although he may fancy that
he is employed in the manufacture of moral and legal doctrines good
for all worlds and all ages he is actually making a distorted,
counterfeit of the conservation or revolutionary tendencies of his
time, because torn from its real place, as things seen in a concave
mirror are upside down.
Herr Duehring therefore resolves society into its simplest elements
and discovers accordingly that the most elementary society consists of
at least two human beings. He thereupon operates with these two human
beings to produce his axiom. Then he delivers himself of the
fundamental maxim of morals, "Two human wills, as such, are entirely
identical, and the one can in consequence make no positive demands
upon the other." Here the "foundation of moral law" is apparent, so
"in order to develop the principal concepts of justice we require two
human beings under absolutely simple and elementary conditions."
That two human wills or two human beings are just alike is not only no
axiom, it is a glaring exaggeration. In the first place two human
beings may differ as regards sex, and this simple fact shows us, if we
look at childhood for a moment, that the elements of society are not
two men, but a little man and a little woman, which constitute a
family, the simplest and earliest form of association for productive
purposes. But Herr Duehring cannot by any means agree to this. On the
one hand the two constituents of society might very possibly be made
alike and on the other Herr Duehring would not be able to construct
the moral and legal equality of man and woman from the original
family. Therefore one of two things must take place. Either the
molecules of Herr Duehring's society from the multiplication of which
all society is built up is merely _a priori_ and destined to fail,
since two men cannot produce a child, or we must consider them as two
heads of families. In this case the entire foundation is made its very
opposite. Instead of the equality of man we have at the most the
equality of two heads of families, and since women are not
comprehended we have the consequent subjection of women.
We are sorry to warn the reader that these two notorious men cannot be
got rid of, for a long time. They take up in the realm of social
conditions the role heretofore played by the dwellers in the other
world with whom it is to be hoped we have now finished. Should any
question of political economy, of politics or any other such matter
require solution, out come the two men and make the thing axiomatic
forthwith. This is a remarkable, clever, and system-shaping discovery
of our system-shaping philosopher. But to give the truth its due we
are regretfully bound to say that he did not discover the two men.
They are common to the whole of the eighteenth century. They appear in
Rousseau's Treatise on Equality, 1754, where, by the way, they serve
to prove axiomatically the direct opposite of Herr Duehring's
contentions. They play an important part in political economy from
Adam Smith to Ricardo, but here they are so far unequal that they
follow different trades, principally hunting and fishing, and they
exchange their mutual products. They serve through the entire
eighteenth century principally as mere illustrative examples, and the
originality of Herr Duehring consists in the fact that he elevates
this method of illustration to a fundamental method for all social
science and to a measure of all historical instruction. There is no
easier way to arrive at "a really scientific philosophy of things and
men."
In order to create the fundamental axiom the two men and their wills
are mutually equal and neither has any right to lord it over the
other. We cannot find two suitable men. They must be two men who are
so free from all national, economic, political and religious
conditions, from sex and personal peculiarities that nothing remains
of either of them but the mere concept "man" and then they are
entirely equal. They are therefore two fully-equipped ghosts conjured
up by that very Herr Duehring who particularly ridicules and denounces
"spiritistic" movements. These two phantoms must of course do all that
their wizard wants of them and so their united productions are a
matter of complete indifference to the rest of the world.
Now let us follow Herr Duehring's axiomatic utterances a little
further. These two men cannot make positive demands upon each other.
The one who does so and enforces his demand thereupon performs an
unjust act, and with this idea as a foundation Herr Duehring explains
the injustice, the tyranny, the servitude, in short all the evil
happenings of history up to the present time. Now Rousseau has in the
work above mentioned proved the contrary just as axiomatically, by
means of two men. A. cannot forcibly enslave B. except by putting B.
in a place where he cannot do without A. This is far too materialistic
an idea for Herr Duehring. He has accordingly put the same matter
somewhat differently. Two shipwrecked men being by themselves on an
island form a society. Their wills are, theoretically speaking,
entirely equal and this is acknowledged by both. But in reality the
inequality is tremendous. A. is resolute and energetic, B. inert,
irresolute and slack. A. is sharp, B. is stupid. How long will it be
before A. imposes his will upon B., first by taking the upper hand,
and keeping it habitually, under the pretence that B.'s submission is
voluntary. Whether the form of voluntariness continues or force is
resorted to slavery still is slavery. Voluntary entering into a state
of slavery lasted all through the Middle Ages in Germany up to the
Thirty Years War. When serfdom was abolished in Prussia after the
defeats of 1806 and 1807 and with it the duty of the nobility to take
care of their subjects in need, sickness and old age the peasants
thereupon petitioned to be allowed to remain in slavery--for who would
care for them when they were in trouble? The concept of the two men is
just as applicable to inequality and slavery as it is to equality and
mutual aid, and since, under the penalty of extinction, men must
assume the headship of a family, hereditary slavery may be foreseen in
it.
Let us put this view of the case on one side for a moment. We assume
that we are convinced by Herr Duehring's maxim and that we are zealous
for the full equalisation of the two wills, for the "universal
sovereignty of man" for the "sovereignty of the individual,"
magnificent expressions, in comparison with which Stirner's
"individual" with his private property is a mere bungler though he
might claim his modest part therein. Then we are all free and
independent. All? No, not even now. There are still "occasional
dependent relations" but these are to be explained "on grounds which
must be sought not in the action of two wills as such but in a third
consideration, in the case of children, for example, in the
inadequateness of their self-assertion."
Indeed, the foundations of independence are not to be sought in the
realisation of the two wills as such. Naturally not, since the
realisation of one of the wills is thus interfered with. But they must
be sought in a third direction. And what is the third direction? The
actual fixing of a subjected will as an inadequate one. So far has our
realistic philosopher departed from reality that will, the real
content, the characteristic determination of this will serves him as a
third ground, for abstract and indefinite speech. However this may be
we must agree that equality has its exceptions. It does not apply to a
will which is infected with inadequateness of self expression.
Further, "Where the animal and the human are intermingled in one
person can one in the name of a second fully developed human being
demand the same actions as in the case of a single human being ... our
supposition is here of two morally unequal persons of which one has a
share of purely animal characteristics in a certain sense the typical
fundamental conception which characterises the differences in and
between groups of men." Now the reader may see by these modest excuses
in which Herr Duehring turns and winds like a Jesuit priest to
establish a casuistical position, how far the human human can prevail
over the bestial human, how far he can employ deceit, warlike, keen
terrorising means of deceit against the latter without overstepping
immutable ethical bounds.
Therefore, if two persons are "morally unequal" there is an end of
equality. It was therefore not worth while to conjure up two fully
equal men, since there are no two individuals who are morally equal.
But inequality consists in this that one is a human being and the
other has some part of the animal in his composition. It is evident
that since man is descended from the animal creation he is not free
from animality. So that as regards man degrees of animality can only
be differentiated to a greater or less degree. A division of men into
two sharply differentiated groups, into humans and human beasts, into
good and bad, into sheep and goats, even Christianity, let alone the
realist philosophy, is aware, implies a judge who makes the
distinction. But who shall be judge as regards the realist philosophy?
We must follow the practice of Christians according to which the pious
little sheep undertake to act as judges of the universe against their
unworthy neighbors the goats, with results which are too well known.
The sect of the realist philosophers supposing it ever comes into
existence will certainly not give up anything quietly. This is indeed
a matter of small concern to us but we are interested in the
confession that as a conclusion of the moral inequality between men
equality no longer exists.
Again "If the one acted in accordance with truth and science but the
other in accordance with a superstition or prejudice a mutual
disagreement would generally occur. At a certain stage of incapacity
barbarism or an evil tendency of character must in all circumstances
produce an antagonism. Force is the last resort not alone with
children and incapables. The peculiar characteristics of whole classes
of men, whether in a state of nature or civilised, may render
necessary the subjection of their inimical will, due to their own
impotency, in order to bring them into harmony with social
arrangements. But such a man has challenged his own equality by the
perversity of his inimical and hurtful actions, and if he suffers at
the hands of a superior force he only reaps the recoil of his own
actions."
Thus not only moral but spiritual inequality is sufficiently potent to
do away with the "full equality" of two wills and to furnish an
ethical rule by which all the shameful acts of civilised plundering
states against backward peoples down to the atrocities of the Russians
in Turkestan may be justified. When General Kaufmann, in the summer of
1873, fell upon the Tartar tribes of the Jomuden, burnt their tents,
mowed down their wives and families, as the command ran, he explained
that the destruction was due to the perversity, the inimical minds of
the people of the Jomuden, and was employed for the purpose of
bringing them back to the social order, and the means used by him had
been the most efficient.
But he who wills the end wills also the means. But he was not so cruel
as to insult the Jomuden people in addition and to say that he
massacred them in the name of equality, that he considered their wills
equal to his own. And again in this conflict the select, those who
pose as champions of truth and science, the realist philosophers in
the last instance must be able to distinguish superstition, prejudice,
barbarism, evil tendencies of character, and when force and subjection
are necessary to bring about equality. So that equality now means
equalisation by means of force, and the will of one recognises the
will of the other as equal by overthrowing it.
The phrase that an external will in its bringing about equalisation by
force is only to be regarded as producing equality is nothing but a
distortion of the Hegelian theory that punishment is a right of the
criminal. "That punishment is to be regarded as implying a right to it
in accordance with which the criminal is respected as a rational
being." (Rechtsphil, 100.)
We may pause here. It would be superfluous to follow Herr Duehring any
further in the piecemeal destruction of his axiomatically established
equality, universal human sovereignty, etc., to observe how he brings
society into existence with two men and produces yet a third in order
to establish the state, because to put the matter briefly, no majority
can be had without the third, and without him, that is, without the
domination of the majority over the minority, no state can exist.
There is no need either for us to observe how he launches his future
social state on the more peaceful waters of construction, where we may
have the honor some fine morning of beholding it. We have seen so far
that the complete equality of two wills only exists as long as they do
not will anything. That as soon as they cease to become human wills as
such and to be converted into real individual wills, into wills of
real persons, that is, equality ceases; that childhood, idiocy,
animality so called, superstition, prejudice, supposed lack of power
on the one hand and supposed humanity and insight into truth and
science on the other hand, that therefore every difference in the
quality of the two wills and in the degree of intelligence
accompanying it justifies an inequality which may go as far as
subjection. Why should we seek further since Herr Duehring has brought
his own edifice of equality which he so laboriously constructed
tumbling to the ground?
But if we are now prepared to meet Herr Duehring's silly and
incompetent consideration of equality of rights we are not yet ready
to take issue with the idea itself which through the influence of
Rousseau has played a theatrical part, and since the days of the great
Revolution a practical and political part, and now plays no
insignificant role in the agitation carried on by the socialist
movement of all countries. The establishment of its scientific
soundness has a value for the proletarian agitation.
The idea that all men have something in common as men and that they
are equal with respect to that common quality is naturally older than
history. But the modern doctrine of equality is something quite
different than that. This derives from the property of humanity,
common to man, the equality of man, as man, or at least of all
citizens of a given state or of all members of a given society. Until
the conclusion of equality of rights in the state and society was
deduced from the original notion of relative equality, and until this
conclusion was to be stated as something natural and self evident,
many thousands of years had to pass and indeed have passed. In the
oldest and most elementary communities it may be said that equality of
rights among the members existed in the highest degree, women, slaves,
and foreigners, however, being excluded. Among the Greeks and Romans
inequality existed to a greater degree. Greeks and barbarians, freemen
and slaves, citizens and subjects, Roman citizens and Roman subjects
(to employ a comprehensive expression) that these should have any
claim to equality of political rights would have been regarded by the
ancients necessarily as madness. Under the Roman Empire there was a
complete elimination of all these distinctions with the exception of
those of freemen and slaves. There arose therefore as far as the
freemen were concerned that equality of private individuals upon which
Roman law was founded and developed as the most perfect system of
jurisprudence based on private property with which we are acquainted.
But while the contradiction of freemen and slaves existed there could
be no statement based upon the universal equality of man as such, as
was recently shown in the slave states of the Northern American Union.
Christianity recognised one equality on the part of all men, that of
an equal taint of original sin, which entirely corresponded with its
character as a religion of slaves and the oppressed. In the next place
it recognised completely the equality of the elect but it only
declared this at the beginning of its teaching. The traces of common
property in possessions which may be found occasionally in the
earliest days of the religion was based rather upon the mutual
assistance which persecuted people hold out to each other, than upon
any real concepts of human equality. Very soon the establishment of
the antithesis between the priesthood and the laity put an end to even
this expression of Christian equality. The inundation of Western
Europe by the Germans abolished for centuries all concepts of equality
by the creation of a universal, social and political gradation of rank
of a much more complicated nature than had existed up to that time.
Contemporaneously with this Western and Middle Europe entered upon a
historical development, shaped for the first time a compact
civilisation, and a system which was on the one hand dynamic and on
the other conservative, the leading national states. Thereupon a soil
was prepared for the declaration of the equality of human rights so
recently made.
The feudal middle ages moreover developed the class in its womb
destined to be the apostle of the modern agitation for equality, the
bourgeois class. In the beginning even under the feudal system the
bourgeois class had developed the prevalent hand-industry and the
exchange of products even within feudal society to a high degree
considering the circumstances, until with the close of the fifteenth
century the great discoveries of lands beyond the seas opened before
it a new and individual course. The trade beyond Europe which up to
that time had been carried on between the Italians and the Levant was
now extended to America and the Indies and soon exceeded in amount the
reciprocal trade of the European countries as well as the internal
commerce of any particular land. American gold and silver flooded
Europe and like a decomposing element penetrated all the fissures,
crevices and pores of feudal society. The system of hand-labor was no
longer sufficient for the growing demand, it was replaced by
manufacture in the leading industries of the most highly developed
peoples.
A corresponding change in the political structure followed this
powerful revolution in the economic conditions of society but by no
means immediately. The organisation of the State remained feudal in
form while society became more and more bourgeois. Trade, particularly
international, and to a greater degree world-commerce demanded for its
development the free and unrestricted possessors of commodities, who
have equality of right to exchange commodities at least in one and the
same place. The transition from hand labor to manufacture presupposes
the existence of a number of free laborers, free on the one hand from
the fetters of the gild and on the other free to employ their labor
force in their own behalf, who could make contracts for the hire of
their labor force to the manufacturers and therefore face him as if
endowed with equal rights as contracting parties. At last then there
arose equality of rights and actual equality of all human labor, for
labor force finds its unconscious but strongest expression in the law
of value of modern bourgeois economy according to which the value of a
commodity finds its measure in the socially necessary labor
incorporated in it. But where the economic circumstances render
freedom and equality of rights necessary, the political code, gild
restrictions and peculiar privileges oppose them at every step. Local
provisions of a legal character, differential taxation, exceptional
laws of every description, interfere not only with foreigners or
colonials but frequently enough also with whole categories of citizens
in the nation itself. Gild privileges in particular constituted a
continual impediment to the development of manufacture. The course was
nowhere open and the chances of the bourgeois victory were by no means
equal, but to make the course open was the first and ever more
pressing necessity.
As soon as the demand for the abolition of feudalism and for the
equality of rights was set on the order of the day it had necessarily
to take an ever widening scope. As soon as the claim was made in
behalf of commerce and industry it had also to be made in behalf of
the peasants who, being in every stage of slavery from serfdom labored
for the most part without any return for the feudal lords and were
obliged in addition to perform innumerable services for them and for
the State. Also it became desirable to abolish feudal privileges, the
immunity of the nobility from taxation, and the superiority which
attached to a certain status. And as men no longer lived in a world
empire like the Roman, but in an independent system with states which
approximated to a similar degree of bourgeois development and which
had intercourse with one another on an equal footing, the demand took
on necessarily a universal character reaching beyond the individual
state, and freedom and equality were thus proclaimed as human rights.
But as regards the special bourgeois character of these human rights,
it is significant that the American Constitution which was the first
to recognise these rights of man in the same breath established
slavery among the colored people: class privileges were cursed, race
privileges were blessed.
As is well known, the bourgeois class as soon as it escaped from the
domination of the ruling class in the cities, by which process the
medieval stage passes into the modern, has been steadily and
inevitably dogged by a shadow, the proletariat. So also the bourgeois
demands for equality are accompanied by the proletarian demands for
equality. Directly the demand for the abolition of class privileges
was made by the bourgeois there succeeded the proletarian demand for
the abolition of classes themselves. This was first made in a
religious form and was based upon early Christianity, but later
derived its support from the bourgeois theories of equality. The
proletarians take the bourgeois at their word, they demand the
realisation of equality not merely apparently, not merely in the
sphere of government but actually in the sphere of society and
economics. Since the French bourgeoisie of the great Revolution placed
equality in the foreground of their movement, the French proletariat
has answered it blow for blow with the demand for social and economic
equality, and equality has become the special battle cry of the French
proletariat.
The demand for equality as made by the proletariat has a double
significance. Either it is, as was particularly the case at first, in
the Peasants' War, for example, a natural reaction against social
inequalities which were obvious, against the contrast between rich and
poor, masters and slaves, luxurious and hungry, and as such it is
simply an expression of revolutionary instinct finding its
justification in that fact and in that fact alone. On the other hand
it may arise from reaction against the bourgeois claims of equality
from which it deduces more or less just and far reaching claims,
serves as a means of agitation to stir the workers, by means of a cry
adopted by the capitalists themselves, against the capitalists, and in
this case stands or falls with bourgeois equality itself. In both
cases the real content of the proletarian claims of equality is the
abolition of classes. Every demand for equality transcending this is
of necessity absurd. We have already given examples and can furnish
many more when we come to consider Herr Duehring's prophecies of the
future.
So the notion of equality, in its proletarian as well as in its
bourgeois form, is itself a historic product. Certain circumstances
were required to produce it and these in their turn proceeded from a
long anterior history. It is therefore anything but an eternal truth.
And if the public regards it as self-evident in one sense or another
if it, as Marx remarks "already occupies the position of a popular
prejudice" it is not due to its being an axiomatic truth but to the
universal broadening of conception in accordance with the spirit of
the eighteenth century. If Herr Duehring then can set up his two
famous men in housekeeping on the grounds of equality, it is apparent
that the prejudices of the mass of men in its favor is an antecedent
condition. In fact Herr Duehring calls his philosophy the "natural"
because it proceeds from generally recognised things, which appear to
him to be entirely natural. But why they seem to him to be natural he
does not take the trouble to enquire.
_Freedom and Necessity._
(The former part of this section is taken up with a criticism of Herr
Duehring's knowledge of law of which he had boasted. It is a purely
technical discussion and is of merely local interest. Having disposed
of Duehring's juristic claims Engels proceeds to discuss "Freedom and
Necessity" as follows.)
One cannot deal properly with the question of morals and law without a
discussion of free will, human responsibility, and the limits of
necessity and freedom. The realistic philosophy has not only one but
two solutions of these questions.
"One must substitute for false theories of freedom the actual
conditions in which reason on the one hand and instinct on the other
unite upon a middle ground. The fundamental facts of this sort of
dynamics are to be learned from observation and as regards the
calculation in advance of phenomena which have not yet occurred, we
must judge of them in general terms according to their special
qualities. In this way the silly speculations with respect to the
freedom of the will which have wasted thousands of years are not only
entirely removed but are replaced by something positive, something
useful for practical life." So freedom of the will consists in this
that reason impels men to the right and irrationality to the left and
according to this parallelogram of forces the true direction is that
of the diagonal. Freedom would therefore be the average between
insight and impulse, between understanding and lack of understanding,
and its degree would to use an astronomical expression be empirically
established by the "personal equation." But a few pages later we read
"We establish moral responsibility upon freedom by which we only mean
susceptibility to known motives according to the measure of natural
and acquired reason. All such motives in spite of antagonism realise
themselves in action with the inevitability of natural law, but we
count upon this inevitable necessity when we deal with morals."
This second definition of freedom which is quite opposed to the first
is nothing but a very weak paraphrase of Hegel's notions on the
subject. Hegel was the first man to make a proper explanation of the
relations of freedom and necessity. In his eyes freedom is the
recognition of necessity. "Necessity is blind only in so far as it is
not understood." Freedom does not consist in an imaginary independence
of natural laws but in a knowledge of these laws and in the
possibility thence derived of applying them intelligently to given
ends. This is true both as regards the laws of nature and of those
which control the spiritual and physical existence of man
himself,--two classes of laws which we can distinguish as an
abstraction but not in reality. Freedom of the will consists in
nothing but the ability to come to a decision when one is in
possession of a knowledge of the facts. The freer the judgment of a
man then in relation to a given subject of discussion so much the more
necessity is there for his arrival at a positive decision. On the
other hand lack of certainty arising from ignorance which apparently
chooses voluntarily between many different and contradictory
possibilities of decision shows thereby its want of freedom, its
control by things which it should in reality control. Freedom,
therefore, consists in mastery over ourselves and external nature
founded upon knowledge of the necessities of nature, it is, therefore,
necessarily a product of historical development. The first human
beings to become differentiated from the lower animals were in all
essentials as devoid of freedom as these animals themselves but each
step in human development was a step towards freedom. At the threshold
of human history stands the discovery of the transformation of
mechanical motion in heat, the generation of fire by friction; at the
close of development up to the present stands the discovery of the
transformation of heat into mechanical motion, the steam engine. In
spite of the tremendous revolution in the direction of freedom which
the steam engine has produced in society it is not yet half complete.
There is no question that the production of fire by friction still
surpasses it as an agent in the liberation of humanity. Because the
production of fire by friction for the first time gave man power over
the forces of nature and separated him for ever from the lower
animals. The steam engine can never bridge so wide a chasm. It appears
however as the representative of all those productive forces by the
help of which alone a state of society is rendered possible in which
no class subjection or pain will be produced by reason of the lack of
means for the sustenance of the individual, in which moreover it will
be possible to speak of real human freedom as arising from living in
accordance with the recognised laws of nature. But considering the
youth of humanity it would be absurd to wish to impute any universal
absolute validity to our present philosophical views, and it follows
from the mere facts that the whole of history up to the present time
is to be regarded as the history of the period extending from the time
of the practical discovery of the transformation of mechanical
movement into heat to that of the transformation of heat into
mechanical movement.
(The above constitutes a reply to the view which regards history
simply as the record of human error and is followed by a discussion of
Duehring's opinions in that regard.)