II Saint Bruno
Before turning to the solemn discussion which Bauer's self-consciousness has with itself and the world, we should reveal one secret. Saint Bruno uttered the battle-cry and kindled the war only because he had to "safeguard" himself and his stale, soured criticism against the ungrateful forgetfulness of the public, only because he had to show that, in the changed conditions of 1845, criticism always remained itself and unchanged. He wrote the second volume of the "good cause and his own cause"3: he stands his ground, he fights pro aris et focis.h In the true theological manner, however, he conceals this aim of his by an appearance of wishing to "characterise" Feuerbach. Poor Bruno was quite forgotten, as was best proved by the polemic between Feuerbach and Stirner,0 in which no notice at all was taken of him. For just this reason he seized on this polemic in order to be able to proclaim himself, as the antithesis of the antago-nists, their higher unity, the Holy Spirit.
Saint Bruno opens his "campaign" with a burst of artillery fire against Feuerbach, that is to say, with a revised and enlarged reprint of an article which had already appeared in the Norddeutsche Blätter? Feuerbach is made into a knight of "substance" in order that Bauer's " self-consciousness" shall stand out in stronger relief. In this tran-substantiation of Feuerbach, which is supposed to be proved by all the writings of the latter, our holy man jumps at once from Feuerbach's writings on Leibniz and Baylea to the Wesen des Christenthums, leaving out the article against the "positive philosophers"[41] in the Hallische Jahrbücher.b This "oversight" is "in place". For there Feuerbach revealed the whole wisdom of "self-consciousness" as against the positive representatives of "substance", at a time when Saint Bruno was still indulging in speculation on the immaculate conception.
It is hardly necessary to mention that Saint Bruno still continues to prance about on his old-Hegelian war horse. Listen to the first passage in his latest revelations from the Kingdom of God:
"Hegel combined into one Spinoza's substance and Fichte's ego; the unity of both, the combination of these opposing spheres, etc., constitutes the peculiar interest but, at the same time, the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. [...] This contradiction in which Hegel's system was entangled had to be resolved and destroyed. But he could only do this by making it impossible for all time to put the question: what is the relation of self-consciousness to the absolute spirit.... This was possible in two ways. Either self-consciousness had to be burned again in the flames of substance, i.e., the pure substantiality relation had to be firmly established and maintained, or it had to be shown that personality is the creator of its own attributes and essence, that it belongs to the concept of personality in general to posit itself" (the "concept" or the "personality"?) "as limited, and again to abolish this limitation which it posits by its universal essence, for precisely this essence is only the result of its inner self-distinction, of its activity" ( Wigand, pp. 86, 87, 88).c
In Die heilige Familie (p. 220)d Hegelian philosophy was represented as a union of Spinoza and Fichte and at the same time the contradiction involved in this was emphasised. The specific peculiarity of Saint Bruno is that, unlike the authors of Die heilige Familie, he does not regard the question of the relation of self-consciousness to substance as "a point of controversy within Hegelian speculation", but as a world-historic, even an absolute question. This is the sole form in which he is capable of expressing the conflicts of the present day. He really believes that the triumph of self-consciousness over substance has a most essential influence not only on European equilibrium but also on the whole future development of the Oregon problem. As to the extent to which the abolition of the Corn Laws in England depends on it, very little has so far transpired.[42] The abstract and nebulous expression into which a real collision is distorted by Hegel is held by this "critical" mind to be the real collision itself. Bruno accepts the speculative contradiction and upholds one part of it against the other. A philosophical phrase about a real question is for him the real question itself. Consequently, on the one hand, instead of real people and their real consciousness of their social relations, which apparently confront them as something independent, he has the mere abstract expression: self-consciousness, just as, instead of real production, he has the activity of this self-consciousness, which has become independent. On the other hand, instead of real nature and the actually existing social relations, he has the philosophical summing-up of all the philosophical categories or names of these relations in the expression: substance; for Bruno, along with all philosophers and ideologists, erroneously regards thoughts and ideas — the independent intellectual expression of the existing world — as the basis of this existing world. It is obvious that with these two abstractions, which have become senseless and empty, he can perform all kinds of tricks without knowing anything at all about real people and their relations. (See, in addition, what is said about substance in connection with Feuerbach and concerning "humane liberalism"'1 and the "holy" in connection with Saint Max.) Hence, he does not forsake the speculative basis in order to solve the contradictions of speculation; he manoeuvres while remaining on that basis, and he himself still stands so much on the specifically Hegelian basis that the relation of "self-consciousness" to the "absolute spirit" still gives him no peace. In short, we are confronted with the philosophy of self-consciousness that was announced in the Kritik der Synoptiker, carried out in Das entdeckte Chrislenthum and which, unfortunately, was long ago anticipated in Hegel's Phänomenologie. This new philosophy of Bauer's was completely disposed of in Die
heilige Familie on page 220 et seq. and on pages 304-07.b Here, however, Saint Bruno even contrives to caricature himself by smuggling in "personality", in order to be able, with Stirner, to portray the single individual as "his own product", and Stirner as Bruno's product. This step forward deserves a brief notice.
First of all, let the reader compare this caricature with the original, the explanation given of self-consciousness in Das entdeckte Christen-thum, page 113, and then let him compare this explanation with its prototype, with Hegel's Phänomenologie, pages 575, 583 and so on. (Both these passages are reproduced in Die heilige Familie, pages 221, 223, 224.a) But now let us turn to the caricature! "Personality in general"! "Concept"! "Universal essence"! "To posit itself as limited and again to abolish the limitation"! "Inner self-distinction"! What tremendous "results"! "Personality in general" is either nonsense "in general" or the abstract concept of personality. Therefore, it is part of the "concept" of the concept of personality to "posit itself as limited". This limitation, which belongs to the "concept" of its concept, personality directly afterwards posits "by its universal essence". And after it has again abolished this limitation, it turns out that "precisely this essence" is "the result of its inner self-distinction". The entire grandiose result of this intricate tautology amounts, therefore, to Hegel's familiar trick of the self-distinction of man in thought, a self-distinction which the unfortunate Bruno stubbornly proclaims to be the sole activity of "personality in general". A fairly long time ago it was pointed out to Saint Bruno that there is nothing to be got from a "personality" whose activity is restricted to these, by now trivial, logical leaps. At the same time the passage quoted contains the naive admission that the essence of Bauer's "personality" is the concept of a concept, the abstraction of an abstraction.
Bruno's criticism of Feuerbach, insofar as it is new, is restricted to hypocritically representing Stirner's reproaches against Feuerbach
and Bauer as Bauer's reproaches against Feuerbach. Thus, for example, the assertions that the "essence of man is essence in general and something holy", that "man is the God of man", that the human species is "the Absolute1', that Feuerbach splits man "into an essential and an inessential ego" (although Bruno always declares that the abstract is the essential and, in his antithesis of criticism and the mass, conceives this split as far more monstrous than Feuerbach does), that a struggle must be waged against the "predicates of God", etc. On the question of selfish and selfless love, Bruno, polemising with Feuerbach, copies Stirner almost word for word for three pages (pp. 133-35) just as he very clumsily copies Stirner's phrases: "every man is his own creation", "truth is a ghost", and so on. In addition, in Bruno the "creation" is transformed into a "product". We shall return to this exploitation of Stirner by Saint Bruno.
Thus, the first thing that we discovered in Saint Bruno was his continual dependence on Hegel. We shall not, of course, dwell further on the remarks he has copied from Hegel, but shall only put together a few more passages which show how firmly he believes in the power of the philosophers and how he shares their illusion that a modified consciousness, a new turn given to the interpretation of existing relations, could overturn the whole hitherto existing world. Imbued with this faith, Saint Bruno also has one of his pupils certify — in issue IV of Wigand's quarterly, p. 327 — that his phrases on personality given above, which were proclaimed by him in issue III, were "world-shattering ideas".3
Saint Bruno says ( Wigand, p. 95)b:
"Philosophy has never been anything but theology reduced to its most general form and given its most rational expression."
This passage, aimed against Feuerbach, is copied almost word for word from Feuerbach's Philosophie der Zukunft (p. 2):
"Speculative philosophy is true, consistent, rational theology."
Bruno continues:
"Philosophy, in alliance with religion, has always striven for the absolute dependence of the individual and has actually achieved this by demanding and causing the absorption of the individual life in universal life, of the accident in substance, of man in the absolute spirit."
As if Bruno's "philosophy", "in alliance with" Hegel's, and his still continuing forbidden association with theology, did not "demand", if not "cause", the "absorption of man" in the idea of one of his "accidents", that of self-consciousness, as "substance"! Moreover, one sees from this whole passage with what joy the church father with his "pulpit eloquence" continues to proclaim his "world-shattering" faith in the mysterious power of the holy theologians and philosophers. Of course, in the interests of the "good cause of freedom and his own cause".c
On page 105 our godfearing man has the insolence to reproach Feuerbach:
"Feuerbach made of the individual, of the depersonalised man of Christianity, not a man, not a true" (!) "real" (!!) "personal" (!!!) "man" (these predicates owe their origin to Die heilige Familie and Stirner), "but an emasculated man, a slave"—
and thereby utters, inter alia, the nonsense that he, Saint Bruno, can make people by means of the mind.
Further on in the same passage he says:
"According to Feuerbach the individual has to subordinate himself to the species, serve it. The species of which Feuerbach speaks is Hegel's Absolute, and it, too, exists nowhere."
Here, as in all the other passages, Saint Bruno does not deprive himself of the glory of making the actual relations of individuals dependent on the philosophical interpretation of these relations. He has not the slightest inkling of the correlation which exists between the concepts of Hegel's "absolute spirit" and Feuerbach's "species" on the one hand and the existing world on the other.
On page 104 the holy father is mightily shocked by the heresy with which Feuerbach transforms the holy trinity of reason, love and will into something that "is in individuals and over individuals", as though, in our day, every inclination, every impulse, every need did not assert itself as a force "in the individual and over the individual", whenever circumstances hinder their satisfaction. If the holy father Bruno experiences hunger, for example, without the means of appeasing it, then even his stomach will become a force "in him and over him". Feuerbach's mistake is not that he stated this fact but that in idealistic fashion he endowed it with independence instead of regarding it as the product of a definite and surmountable stage of historical development.
Page 111 : "Feuerbach is a slave and his servile nature does not allow him to fulfil the work of a man, to recognise the essence of religion" (what a fine "work of a man"!).... "He does not perceive the essence of religion because he does not know the bridge over which he can make his way to the source of religion."
Saint Bruno still seriously believes that religion has its own "essence". As for the "bridge", "over which" one makes one's way to the "source of religion", this asses' bridge3 must certainly be an aqueduct. At the same time Saint Bruno establishes himself as a curiously modernised Charon who has been retired owing to the building of the bridge, becoming a tollkeeperb who demands a halfpenny[13] from every person crossing the bridge to the spectral realm of religion.
On page 120 the saint remarks:
"How could Feuerbach exist if there were no truth and truth were onlv a spectre" (Stirner, help!1) "of which hitherto man has been afraid?"
The "man" who fears the "spectre" of "truth" is no other than the worthy Bruno himself. Ten pages earlier, on p. 110, he had already let out the following world-shattering cry of terror at the sight of the "spectre" of truth:
"Truth which is never of itself encountered as a readv-made object and which develops itself and reaches unity only in the unfolding of personality."
Thus, we have here not only truth, this spectre, transformed into a person which develops itself and reaches unity, but in addition this trick is accomplished in a third personality outside it, after the manner of the tapeworm. Concerning the holy man's former love affair with truth, when he was still young and the lusts of the flesh still strong in him — see Die heilige Familie, p. 115 et seq.(1)
How purified of all fleshly lusts and earthly desires our holy man now appears is shown by his vehement polemic against Feuerbach's sensuovsness. Bruno by no means attacks the highly restricted way in which Feuerbach recognises sensuousness. He regards Feuerbach's unsuccessful attempt, since it is an attempt to escape ideology, as — a sin. Of course! Sensuousness is lust of the eye, lust of the flesh and arrogance(2)—horror and abomination(3) in the eyes of the Lord! Do you not know that to be fleshly minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace; for to be fleshly minded is hostility to criticism, and everything of the flesh is of this world. And do you not know that it is written: the works of the flesh are manifest, they are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, obscenity, idolatry, witchcraft, enmity, strife, envy, anger, quarrelsomeness, discord, sinful gangs, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony and the like.(4) I pro-phesy to you, as I prophesied before, that those who do such works will not inherit the kingdom of criticism; but woe to them for in their thirst for delights they are following the path of Cain and are falling into the error of Balaam, and will perish in a rebellion, like that of Korah. These lewd ones feast shamelessly on your alms, and fatten themselves. They are clouds without water driven by the wind; bare, barren trees, twice dead and uprooted; wild ocean waves frothing their own shame; errant stars condemned to the gloom of darkness for ever.(5) For we have read that in the last days there will be terrible times, people will appear who think much of themselves, lewd vilifiers who love voluptuousness(6) more than criticism, makers of sinful gangs, in short, slaves of the flesh. Such people are shunned by Saint Bruno, who is spiritually minded and loathes the stained covering of the flesh (7) and for this reason he condemns Feuerbach, whom he regards as the Korah of the gang, to remain outside together with the dogs, the magicians, the debauched and the assassins.(8) "Sensuousness"—ugh! Not only does it throw the saintly church father into the most violent convulsions, but it even makes him sing, and on page 121 he chants the "song of the end and the end of the song". Sensuousness — do you know, unfortunate one, what sensuousness is? Sensuousness is — a "stick" (p. 130). Seized with convulsions, Saint Bruno even wrestles on one occasion with one of his own theses, just as Jacob of blessed memory wrestled with God, with the one difference that God twisted Jacob's thigh, while our saintly epileptic twists all the limbs and ties of his own thesis, and so, by a number of striking examples, makes clear the identity of subject and object:
"Feuerbach may say what he likes ... all the same he destroys" (!) "man... for he transforms the word man into a mere phrase ... for he does not wholly make" (!) "and create" (!) "man, but raises the whole of mankind to the Absolute, for in addition he declares not mankind, but rather the senses to be the organ of the Absolute, and stamps the sensuous — the object of the senses, of perception, of sensation — as the Absolute, the indu-bitable and the immediately certain. Whereby Feuerbach — such is Saint Bruno's opinion—"can undoubtedly shake layers of the air, but he cannot smash the phenomena of human essence, because his innermost" (!) "essence and his vitalising spirit [...] already destroys the external" (!) "sound and makes it empty and jarring" (p. 121).
Saint Bruno himself gives us mysterious but decisive disclosures about the causes of his nonsensical attitude:
"As though my ego does not also possess just this particular sex, unique, compared with all others, and these particular, unique sex organs." (Besides his "unique sex organs", this noble-minded man also possesses a special "unique sex"!)
This unique sex is explained on page 121 in the sense that:
"sensuousness, like a vampire, sucks all the marrow and blood from the lifeoî man; it is the insurmountable barrier against which man has to deal himself a mortal blow".
But even the saintliest man is not pure! They are all sinners and lack the glory that they should have before "self-consciousness". Saint Bruno, who in his lonely cell at midnight struggles with "substance", has his attention drawn by the frivolous writings of the heretic Feuerbach to women and female beauty. Suddenly his sight becomes less keen; his pure self-consciousness is besmirched, and a reprehensible, sensuous fantasy plays about the frightened critic with lascivious images. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.(9)
Bruno stumbles, he falls, he forgets that he is the power that "with its strength binds, frees and dominates the world",(10) he forgets that these products of his imagination are "spirit of his spirit", he loses all "self-control" and, intoxicated, stammers a dithyramb to female beauty, to its "tenderness, softness, womanliness", to the "full and rounded limbs" and the "surging, undulating, seething, rushing and hissing, wave-like structure of the body"(11) of woman. Innocence, however, always reveals itself — even where it sins. Who does not know that a "surging, undulating, wave-like structure of the body" is something that no eye has ever seen, or ear heard? Therefore — hush, sweet soul, the spirit will soon prevail over the rebellious flesh and set an insurmountable "barrier" to the overflowing, seething lusts, "against which" they will soon deal themselves a "mortal blow".
"Feuerbach"—the saint finally arrives at this through a critical understanding of Die heilige Familie—"is a materialist tempered with and corrupted by humanism, i.e., a materialist who is unable to endure the earth and its being" (Saint Bruno knows the being of the earth as distinct from the earth itself, and knows how one should behave in order to "endure the beingoi the earth"!) "but wants to spiritualise himself and rise into heaven; and at the same time he is a humanist who cannot think and build a spiritual world, but one who is impregnated with materialism", and so on (p. 123).
Just as for Saint Bruno humanism, according to this, consists in "thinking" and in "building a spiritual world", so materialism consists in the following:
"The materialist recognises only the existing, actual being, matter" (as though man with all his attributes, including thought, were not an "existing, actual being"), "and recognises it as actively extending and realising itself in multiplicity, nature" (p. 123).
First, matter is an existing, actual being, but only in itself, concealed; only when it "actively extends and realises itself in mul-tiplicity" (an "existing, actual being" "realises itself"!!), only then does it become nature. First there exists the concept of matter, an abstraction, an idea, and this latter realises itself in actual nature. Word for word the Hegelian theory of the pre-existence of the creative categories. From this point of view it is understandable that Saint Bruno mistakes the philosophical phrases of the materialists concerning matter for the actual kernel and content of their world out-
Endnotes
[41] "Positive philosophy" — a mystical religious trend (Christian Hermann Weisse, Immanuel Hermann Fichte Junior, Anton Günther, Franz Xaver von Baader, and Friedrich Schelling in his late period), which criticised Hegel's philosophy from the right. The "positive philosophers" tried to make philosophy subservient to religion, denied the possibility of rational cognition and proclaimed divine revelation the only source of "positive" knowledge. They called "negative" every philosophy which recognised rational cognition as its source.
[42] Oregon was claimed by both the U.S.A. and Britain. The struggle for the possession of Oregon ended in June 1846 with the division of the territory between the U.S.A. and Britain. For the Corn Laws see Note 29.
[13] The agrarian law proposed by Licinius and Sextius, Roman tribunes of the people, was passed in 367 B.C. as a result of the struggle waged by the plebeians against the patricians. It prohibited Roman citizens from holding more than 500 jugera (about 309 acres) of common land (ager publicus). By civil wars in Rome is usually meant the struggle between various groups of the Roman ruling class which started at the end of the 2nd century B.C. and continued until 30 B.C. These wars, together with the growing class contradictions and slave revolts, accelerated the decline of the Roman Republic and led to the establishment, in 30 B.C., of the Roman Empire.