Part 13 (1/2)
Strauss becomes even more radical in his book, The Christian Doctrine in the Course of Its Historical Development and Its Struggle with Modern Science, which appeared in the years 1840 and 1841. Here he intends to dissolve the Christian dogmas in their poetic form so as to obtain the thought content of the truths contained in them. He now points out that the modern consciousness is incompatible with the consciousness that clings to the old mythological picture representation of the truth.
May, then, the believers allow the knowers to go their own way unmolested and vice versa; we do not deprive them of their belief; let them grant us our philosophy, and, if the super-pious should succeed in ejecting us from their church, we shall consider that as a gain. Enough wrong compromises have now been attempted; only the separation of the opposite camps can now lead us ahead.
These views of Strauss produced an enormous uproar. It was deeply resented that those representing the modern world conception were no longer satisfied in attacking only the basic religious conceptions in general, but, equipped with all scientific means of historical research, attempted to eliminate the irrelevancy about which Lichtenberg had once said that it consisted of the fact that ”human nature had submitted even to the yoke of a book.” He continued: One cannot imagine anything more horrible, and this example alone shows what a helpless creature man really is in concreto, enclosed as he really is in this two-legged vessel of earth, water and salt. If it were ever possible that reason could have a despotic throne erected, a man who seriously wanted to contradict the Copernican system through the authority of a book would have to be hanged. To read in a book that it originates from G.o.d is not a proof as yet that it really does. It is certain, however, that our reason has its origin in G.o.d no
matter in what sense one takes the word G.o.d. Reason punishes, where it rules, only through the natural consequences of a transgression or through instruction, if instruction can be called punishment.
Strauss was discharged from his position as a tutor at the Seminary of Tuebingen because of his book, The Life of Jesus, and when he then accepted a professors.h.i.+p in theology at the University of Zurich, the peasants came to meet him with thres.h.i.+ng flails in order to make the position of the dissolver of the myth impossible and to force his retirement.
Another thinker, Bruno Bauer (1809 1882), in his criticism of the old world conception from the standpoint of the new, went far beyond the aim that Strauss had set for himself. He held the same view as Feuerbach, that man's nature is also his supreme being and any other kind of a supreme being is only an illusion created after man's image and set above himself.
But Bauer goes further and expresses this opinion in a grotesque form. He describes how he thinks the human ego came to create for itself an illusory counter-image, and he uses expressions that show they are not inspired by the wish for an intimate understanding of the religious consciousness as was the case with Strauss. They have their origin in the pleasure of destruction. Bauer says: The all-devouring ego became frightened of itself; it did not dare to consider itself as everything and as the most general power, that is to say, it still kept the form of the religious spirit and thus completed its self-alienation in setting its own general power against itself in fear and trembling for its own preservation and salvation.
Bruno Bauer is a personality who sets out to test his impetuous thinking critically against everything in existence.
That thinking is destined to penetrate to the essence of things
is a conviction he adopted from Hegel's world conception, but he does not, like Hegel, tend to let thinking lead to results and a thought structure. His thinking is not productive, but critical. He would have felt a definite thought or a positive idea as a limitation. He is unwilling to limit the power of critical thought by taking his departure from a definite point of view as Hegel had done.
Critique is, on the one hand, the last act of a definite philosophy, which through this act frees itself from the limitation of a positive determination, still curtailed in its generality. It is, therefore, on the other hand, the presupposition without which philosophy cannot be raised to the last level of generality of the self-consciousness.
This is the credo of the Critique of World Conception to which Bruno Bauer confesses. This ”critique” does not believe in thoughts and ideas but in thinking alone. ”Only now has man been discovered,” announces Bauer triumphantly, for now man is bound by nothing except his thinking. It is not human to surrender to a non-human element, but to work everything out in the melting pot of thinking. Man is not to be the afterimage of another being, but above all, he is to be ”a human being,” and he can become human only through his thinking. The thinking man is the true man. Nothing external, neither religion nor right, neither state nor law, etc., can make him into a human being, but only his thinking. The weakness of a thinking that strives to reach the self-consciousness but cannot do so is demonstrated in Bauer.
Feuerbach had declared the ”human being to be man's supreme being; Bruno Bauer maintained that he had discovered it for the first time through his critique of world conception; Max Stirner (1806 1856) set himself the task of
approaching this ”human being” completely without bias and without presupposition in his book, The Only One and His Possession, which appeared in 1845. This is Stirner's judgment: With the power of desperation, Feuerbach grasps at the entire content of Christianity, not in order to throw it away, but, on the contrary, in order to seize it, to draw upon this content for so long and so ardently desired and yet always so remote, with a last effort down from heaven, to have and to hold onto it forever. Is this not the clutch of last despair, a matter of life and death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and pa.s.sionate desire for the beyond? The hero does not mean to depart into the beyond, but to draw the beyond down to himself so that it should turn into this world. Has not all the world since then been screaming more or less consciously, ”This world is all that matters; heaven must come down to earth and must be felt here already?”
Stirner opposes the view of Feuerbach with his violent contradiction: The highest being, to be sure, is man's being, but exactly because it is his being and not he, himself, is it a matter of complete indifference whether we contemplate it outside man, considering it as G.o.d, or whether we find it in him and call it ”the nature of man,” or the ”human being.” I am neither G.o.d nor the human being, neither the highest being nor my own being, and for this reason, it is fundamentally of no importance whether I think this nature within myself or without. We do, indeed, always think the supreme being in both forms of beyondness, in the inward one as well as in the outward one at the same time, for the ”spirit of G.o.d” is, according to Christian conception, also ”our spirit”
and ”dwelleth within us.” This spirit dwells in heaven and within us. We, poor things, are nothing but his ”dwelling place” and if Feuerbach now goes about and destroys his heavenly habitations and forces him bag and baggage to move
into us, then we, as his terrestrial quarters, will become very badly overcrowded.
The individual human ego does not consider itself from its own standpoint but from the standpoint of a foreign power. A religious man claims that there is a divine supreme being whose afterimage is man. He is possessed by this supreme being. The Hegelian says that there is a general world reason and it realizes itself to reach its climax in the human ego. The ego is therefore possessed by this world reason. Feuerbach maintains that there is a nature of the human being and every particular person is an individualized afterimage of this nature. Every individual is thereby possessed by the idea of the ”nature of humanity.” For only the individual man is really existing, not the ”generic concept of humanity” by which Feuerbach replaces the divine being. If, then, the individual man places the ”genus man” above himself, he abandons himself to an illusion, just as much as when he feels himself dependent on a personal G.o.d. For Feuerbach, therefore, the commandments the Christian considers as given by G.o.d, and which for this reason he accepts as valid, change into commandments that have their validity because they are in accordance with the general idea of humanity. Man now judges himself morally by asking the question: Do my actions as an individual correspond to what is adequate to the nature of humanity in general? For Feuerbach says: If the essence of humanity is man's supreme being, then the highest and first law of his practical life must also be the love of man to man. h.o.m.o homini deus est, man is G.o.d to man.
Ethics is in itself a divine power. Moral relations.h.i.+ps are by themselves truly religious relations.h.i.+ps. Life in general is, in its substantial connections, of a thoroughly divine nature.
Everything that is right, true and good carries the ground of its salvation in its own qualities. Friends.h.i.+p is and shall be sacred, as shall be property and marriage, and sacred shall be
the well-being of every man, but sacred in and for itself.
There are, then, general human powers, and ethics is one of them. It is sacred in and for itself; the individual has to submit to it. The individual is not to will what it decides out of its own initiative, but what follows from the direction of the sacred ethics. The individual is possessed by this ethics. Stirner characterizes this view as follows: The G.o.d of all, namely, the human being, has now been elevated to be the G.o.d of the individual, for it is the highest aim of all of us to be a human being. As no one can entirely become what the idea of humanity expresses, however, the ”human being” remains for every individual a sublime beyond, an unattainable supreme being, a G.o.d.
But such a supreme being is also thinking, which has been elevated to be G.o.d by the critique of world conception. Stirner cannot accept this either.
The critical thinker is afraid of becoming dogmatic, or of making positive statements. Of course, he would in doing so become the opposite of a critic, a dogmatist; he would then be as bad as a dogmatist as he is now good as a critic. . . . There must by no means be any dogma! This is his dogma. For the critic stays on the same ground with the dogmatist, namely, on the ground of thought. Like the dogmatist, he always proceeds from a thought, but he differs insofar as he abandons the practice of preserving the princ.i.p.al thought in the process of thinking; he does not allow this process to become stabilized. He only emphasizes the process of thinking against the belief in thoughts, the process of the former against the stagnation of the latter. No thought is safe against criticism because it is thinking or the thinking spirit itself. . . . I am no antagonist of criticism, that is to say, I am no dogmatist and feel that the teeth of the critic that tear the flesh of the
dogmatist do not touch me. If I were a dogmatist, I should place a dogma, a thought, an idea, a principle, at the beginning, and I should begin this process as a systematic thinker by spinning it out into a system that is a thought structure. If, on the other hand, I were a critical thinker, that is, an opponent of the dogmatist, then I should lead the fight of free thinking against the enslaved thought. I should defend thinking against the result of this activity. But I am neither the champion of thought nor of thinking.
Every thought is also produced by the individual ego of an individual, even the thought of one's own being, and when man means to know his own ego and wants to describe it according to its nature, he immediately brings it into dependence on this nature. No matter what I may invent in my thinking, as soon as I determine and define myself conceptually, I make myself the slave of the result of the definition, the concept. Hegel made the ego into a manifestation of reason, that is to say, he made it dependent on reason. But all such generalities cannot be valid with regard to the ego because they all have their source in the ego.
They are caused by the fact that the ego is deceived by itself. It is really not dependent, for everything on which it could depend must first be produced by the ego. The ego must produce something out of itself, set it above itself and allow it to turn into a spectre that haunts its own originator.
Man, you have bats in your belfry; there is a screw loose in your head! You imagine big things; you invent a whole world of G.o.ds that is supposed to be there for your benefit, a realm of spirit for which you are destined, an ideal that is becoming you. You have an idee fixe!
In reality, no thinking can approach what lives within me as ”I.” I can reach everything with my thinking; only my ego is an exception in this respect. I cannot think it; I can only
experience it. I am not will; I am not idea; I am that no more than the image of a deity. I make all other things comprehensible to myself through thinking. The ego I am. I have no need to define and to describe myself because I experience myself in every moment. I need to describe only what I do not immediately experience, what is outside myself.
It is absurd that I should also have to conceive myself as a thought, as an idea, since I always have myself as something.
If I face a stone, I may attempt to explain to myself what this stone is. What I am myself, I need not explain; it is given in my life.
Stirner answers to an attack against his book: The ”only one” is a word and with a word it should be possible to think something; a word should have a thought content.
But the ”only one” is a thoughtless word; it does not have a thought content. What then is its content if it is not thought?
It is a content that cannot be there a second time and therefore is also incapable of being expressed; for if it could be expressed, really and completely pressed out, then it would be there a second time; it would be there in the expression.
Because the content of the ”only one” is not a thought content, it is also unthinkable and ineffable, but because it is ineffable, this perfectly empty phrase is at the same time not a phrase.
Only when nothing is said of you, when you are simply called, are you recognized as you. As long as something is said of you, you are recognized only as this something (human being, spirit, Christian, etc.). The ”only one” does not contain a statement because it is only name, saying nothing more than that you are you and nothing but you; that you are a unique ”you” and you yourself. Through this, you are without a predicate, and thereby without quality, calling, legal standing and restriction, and so forth. (Compare Stirner's Kleine Schriften, edited by J. H. Mackay, pp. 116.)
Stirner, in an essay written in 1842, The Untrue Principle of Our Education, or Humanism and Realism, had already expressed his conviction that thinking cannot penetrate as far as the core of the personality. He therefore considers it an untrue educational principle if this core of the personality is not made the objective of education, but when knowledge as such a.s.sumes this position in a one-sided way.
A knowledge that does not so purge and concentrate itself that it inspires the will, or in other words, that only weighs me down with possession and property instead of having become entirely one with me so that the freely moving ego, unhampered by any c.u.mbersome belongings travels through the world with an open mind; a knowledge, then, that has not become personal will make a miserable preparation for life. . .