Selected Essays - The Original Classic Edition. Marx Karl

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СКАЧАТЬ nation is even less liberated by the emancipation of an individual. The Scythians made no advance towards Greek culture because Greece numbered a Scythian among her philosophers. Luckily we Germans are no Scythians.

       As the old nations lived their previous [22]history in imagination, in mythology, so we Germans live our history to come in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy

       is the ideal prolongation of German history. If, therefore, we criticize the oeuvres posthumes of our ideal history, philosophy, instead of the oeuvres incompletes of our real history, our criticism occupies a position among the questions of which the present says: that is the question.[4] That which represents the decaying elements of practical life among the progressive nations with modern State conditions first of all becomes critical decay in the philosophical reflexion of these conditions in Germany, where the conditions themselves do not yet exist.

       German juridical and political philosophy is the sole element of German history which stands al pari with the official modern present.

       The German people must therefore strike this their dream history against their existing conditions, and subject to criticism not only

       these conditions, but at the same time their abstract continuation.

       [23]Their future can neither be confined to the direct denial of their real nor to the direct enforcement of their ideal political and juridical conditions, for they possess the direct denial of their real conditions in their ideal conditions, and the direct enforcement of their ideal conditions they have almost outlived in the opinion of neighbouring nations. Consequently the practical political party in Germany properly demands the negation of philosophy. Its error consists not in the demand, but in sticking to the demand, which seriously it neither does nor can enforce. It believes it can accomplish this negation by turning its back on philosophy, the while its averted head utters a few irritable and banal phrases over it. Moreover, its horizon is so limited as to exclude philosophy from the realm of German actuality unless it imagines philosophy to be implied in German practice and in the theories subserving it. It urges the necessity for linking up with vital forces, but forgets that the real vital force of the German people has hitherto only pullulated under its skull.

       In a word: you cannot abolish philosophy without putting it into practice. The same error, only with the factors reversed, is [24]committed by the theoretical party, the political party which founds on philosophy.

       The latter perceives in the present struggle only the critical struggle of philosophy with the German world; it does not suspect that

       all previous philosophy has itself been a part of this world, and is its complement, if an ideal one. While critical towards its opposing party, it behaves uncritically towards itself. It starts from the assumptions of philosophy, but either refuses to carry further the results yielded by philosophy, or claims as the direct outcome of philosophy results and demands which have been culled from another sphere.

       We reserve to ourselves a more detailed examination of this party.

       Its fundamental defect may be reduced to this: it believes it can enforce philosophy without abolishing it. The criticism of German juridical and political philosophy, which has received through Hegel its most consistent, most ample and most recent shape, is at once both the critical analysis of the modern State and of the actuality which is connected therewith, and in addition the decisive

       repudiation of the entire previous mode of the [25]German political and juridical consciousness, whose principal and most universal expression, elevated to the level of a science, is speculative jurisprudence itself.

       While, on the one hand, speculative jurisprudence, this abstract and exuberant thought-process of the modern State, is possible only

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       in Germany, on the other hand, the German conception of the modern State, making abstraction of real men, was only possible because and in so far as the modern State itself makes abstraction of real men or only satisfies the whole of man in an imaginary manner.

       Germans have thought in politics what other peoples have done. Germany was their theoretical conscience. The abstraction and ar-rogance of her thought always kept an even pace with the one-sidedness and stunted growth of her actuality. If, therefore, the status quo of the German civic community expresses the completion of the ancien regime, the completion of the pile driven into the flesh of the modern State, the status quo of German political science expresses the inadequacy of the modern State, the decay that is set up in its flesh.

       As a decisive counterpart of the previous [26]mode of German political consciousness, the criticism of speculative jurisprudence

       does not run back upon itself, but assumes the shape of problems for whose solution there is only one means: practice.

       The question arises: can Germany attain to a practice a la hauteur de principes,[5] that is, to a revolution which will not only raise her to the level of modern nations, but to the human level which will be the immediate future of these nations?

       The weapon of criticism cannot in any case replace the criticism of weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory too becomes a material force as soon as it grasps weapons. Theory is capable of grasping weapons as soon as its argument becomes ad hommine, and its argument becomes ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the mat-ter by its root. Now the root for mankind is man himself. The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and therefore of its practical energy, is its outcome from the decisive and positive abolition of religion.

       The criticism of religion ends with the [27]doctrine that man is the supreme being for mankind, and therefore with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, servile, neglected, contemptible being, conditions which cannot be better described than by the exclamation of a Frenchman on the occasion of a projected dog tax: "Poor dogs; they want to treat you like men!"

       Even historically, theoretical emancipation has a specifically practical significance for Germany. Germany's revolutionary past is particularly theoretical, it is the Reformation. Then it was the monk, and now it is the philosopher in whose brain the revolution begins.

       Luther vanquished servility based upon devotion, because he replaced it by servility based upon conviction. He shattered faith in authority, because he restored the authority of faith. He transformed parsons into laymen, because he transformed laymen into parsons. He liberated men from outward religiosity, because he made religiosity an inward affair of the heart. He emancipated the body from chains, because he laid chains upon the heart.

       [28]But if Protestantism is not the true solution, it was the true formulation of the problem. The question was no longer a struggle between the layman and the parson external to him; it was a struggle with his own inner parson, his parsonic nature. And if the protestant transformation of German laymen into parsons emancipated the lay popes, the princes, together with their clergy, the privileged and the philistines, the philosophic transformation of the parsonic Germans into men will emancipate the people. But little as emancipation stops short of the princes, just as little will the secularization of property stop short of church robbery, which was chiefly set on foot by the hypocritical Prussians. Then the Peasants' War, the most radical fact of German history, came to grief on the reef of theology. To-day, when theology itself has come to grief, the most servile fact of German history, our status quo, will be shivered on the rock of philosophy.

       The day before the Reformation, official Germany was the most abject vassal of Rome. The day before its revolution, it is the abject

       vassal of less than Rome, of Prussia and Austria, of country squires and philistines. [29]Meanwhile СКАЧАТЬ