3. Saint Bruno versus the Authors of Die Heilige Familie
Saint Bruno, who has disposed of Feuerbach and Stirner in the manner indicated and who has "cut the unique off from all progress", now turns against the apparent "consequences of Feuerbach", the German Communists and, especially, the authors of Die heilige Familie. The expression "real humanism", which he found in the preface to this polemic treatise,(1) provides the main basis of his hypothesis. He will recall a passage from the Bible:
"And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal" (in our case it was just the opposite), "even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it" (1 Corinthians, 3:1-2).
The first impression that Die heilige Familie made on the worthy church father was one of profound distress and serious, respectable sorrow. The one good side of the book is that it "showed what Feuerbach had to become, and the position his philosophy can adopt, if it desires to fight against criticism" (p. 138),
that, consequently, it combined in an easy-going way "desiring" with "what can be" and "what must be", but this good side does not out-weigh its many distressing sides. Feuerbach's philosophy, which strangely enough is presupposed here,
"dare not and cannot understand the critic, dare not and cannot know and perceive criticism in its development, dare not and cannot know that, in relation to all that is transcendental, criticism is a constant struggle and victory, a continual destruction and creation, the sole" (!) "creative and productive principle. It dare not and cannot know how the critic has worked, and still works, to posit and to make" (!) "the transcendental forces, which up to now have suppressed mankind and not allowed it to breathe and live, into what they really are, the spirit of the spirit, the innermost of the innermost, a native thing" (!) "out of and in the native soil, products and creations of self-consciousness. It dare not and cannot know that the critic and only the critic has smashed religion in its entirety, and the state in its various manifestations, etc." (pp. 138, 139).
Is this not an exact copy of the ancient Jehovah, who runs after his errant people who found greater delight in the cheerful pagan gods, and cries out:
"Hear me, Israel, and close not your ear, Judah! Am I not the Lord your God, who led you out of the land of Egypt into the land flowing with milk and honey, and behold, from your earliest youth you have done evil in my sight and angered me with the work of my hands and turned your back unto me and not your face towards me, though I invariably tutored you; and you have brought abominations into my house to defile it, and built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Himmon, which I did not command, and it never entered my head that you should do such abominations; and I have sent to you my servant Jeremiah, to whom I did address my word, beginning with the thirteenth year of the reign of King Josiah, son of Amon, unto this day — and for twenty-three years now he has been zealously preaching to you, but ye have not harkened. Therefore says the Lord God: Who has ever heard the like of the virgin of Israel doing such an abomination. For rain water does not disappear so quickly as my people forgets me. O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord!"3
Thus, in a lengthy speech on "to dare" and "to be able", Saint Bruno asserts that his communist opponents have misunderstood him. The way in which he describes criticism in this recent speech, the way in which he transforms the former forces that suppressed "the life of mankind" into "transcendental forces", and these transcendental forces into the "spirit of the spirit", and the way in which he presents "criticism" as the sole branch of production proves that the apparent misconception is nothing but a disagreeable conception. We proved that Bauer's criticism is beneath all criticism, owing to which we have inevitably become dogmatists. He even in all seriousness reproaches us for our insolent disbelief in his ancient phrases. The whole mythology of independent concepts, with Zeus the Thunderer — self-consciousness — at the head, is paraded here once again to the "jingling of hackneyed phrases of a whole janissary band of current categories". (Literatur-Zeitung, ci. Die heilige Familie,
p. 234b). First of all, of course, the myth of the creation of the world, i.e., of the hard "labour" of the critic, which is "the sole creative and productive principle, a constant struggle and victory, a continual destruction and creation", "working" and "having worked". Indeed, the reverend father even reproaches Die heilige Familie for understanding "criticism" in the same way as he understands it himself in the present rejoinder. After taking back "substance" "into the land of its birth, self-consciousness, the criticising and" (since Die heilige Familie also) "the criticised man, and discarding it" (self-consciousness here seems to take the place of an ideological lumber-room), he continues:
"It" (the alleged philosophy of Feuerbach) "dare not know that criticism and the critics, as long as they have existed" (!)"have guided and made history, that even their opponents and all the movements and agitations of the present time are their creation, that it is they alone who hold power in their hands, because strength is in their consciousness, and because they derive power from themselves, from their deeds, from criticism, from their opponents, from their creations; that only by the act of criticism is man freed, and thereby men also, and man is created" (!) "and thereby mankind as well".
Thus, criticism and the critics are first of all two wholly different subjects, existing and operating apart from each other. The critic is a subject different from criticism, and criticism is a subject different from the critic. This personified criticism, criticism as a subject, is precisely that "critical criticism" against which Die heilige Familie was directed. "Criticism and the critics, as long as they have existed, have guided and made history." It is clear that they could not do so "as long as they" did not "exist", and it is equally clear that "as long as they have existed" they "made history" in their own fashion. Finally, Saint Bruno goes so far as to "dare and be able" to give us one of the most profound explanations about the state-shattering power of criticism, namely, that "criticism and the critics hold power in their hands, because" (a fine "because"!) "strength is in their consciousness", and, secondly, that these great manufacturers of history "hold power in their hands", because they "derive power from themselves and from criticism" (i.e., again from themselves)—whereby it is still, unfortunately, not proven that it is possible to "derive" anything at all from there, from "themselves", from "criticism". On the basis of criticism's own words, one should at least believe that it must be difficult to "derive" from there anything more than the category of "substance" "discarded" there. Finally, criticism also "derives" "from criticism" "power" for a highly monstrous oracular dictum. For it reveals to us a secret that was hidden(2) from our fathers and unknown to our grandfathers, the secret that "only by the act of criticism is man created, and thereby mankind as well"—whereas, up to now, criticism was erroneously regarded as an act of people who existed prior to it owing to quite different acts. Hence it seems that Saint Bruno himself came "into the world, from the world, and to the world" through "criticism", i.e., by generatio aequivoca.(3) All this is, perhaps, merely another interpretation of the following passage from the Book of Genesis: And Adam knew, i.e., criticised, Eve his wife: and she conceived,3 etc.
Thus we see here the whole familiar critical criticism, which was already sufficiently characterised in Die heilige Familie, confronting us again with all its trickery as though nothing had happened. There is no need to be surprised at this, for the saint himself complains, on page 140, that Die heilige Familie "cuts criticism off from all progress". With the greatest indignation Saint Bruno reproaches the authors of Die heilige Familie because, by means of a chemical process, they evaporated Bauer's criticism from its "fluid" state into a "crystalline'''' state.
It follows that "institutions of mendicancy", the "baptismal certificate of adulthood", the "regions of pathos and thunder-like aspects", the "Mussulman conceptual affliction" (Die heilige Familie,
pp. 2, 3, 4b according to the critical Literatur-Zeitung)—all this is nonsense only if it is understood in the "crystalline" manner. And the twenty-eight historical howlers of which criticism was proved guilty in its excursion on "Englische Tagesfragen"0—are they not errors when looked at from the "fluid" point of view? Does criticism insist that; from the fluid point of view, it prophesied a priori the Nauwerck conflict[44]—long after this had taken place before its eyes — and did not construct it post festum?d Does it still insist that the word maréchal could mean "farrier" from the "crystalline" point of view, but from the "fluid" point of view at any rate must mean "marshal"} Or that although in the "crystalline" conception "un fait physique" may mean "a physical fact", the true "fluid" translation should be "a fact of physics"? Or that "la malveillance de nos bourgeois juste-milieux"e in the "fluid" state still means "the carefreeness of our good burghers"? Does it insist that, from the "fluid" point of view, "a child that does not, in its turn, become a father or mother is essentially a daughter"? That someone can have the task "of representing, as it were, the last tear of grief shed by the past"? That the various concierges, lions, grisettes, marquises, scoundrels and wooden doors in Paris in their "fluid" form are nothing but phases
Cf. Genesis 4 : 1.—Ed. The expressions quoted are from Carl Reichardt's reviews, published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, of the following books: Karl Heinrich Brüggemann, Preussens Beruf in der deutschen Staats-Entwicklung..., and Daniel Benda, Katechismus für wahlberechtigte Bürger in Preussen. They are also quoted in The Holy Family (see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 10).—Ed.
of the mystery "in whose concept in general it belongs to posit itself as limited and again to abolish this limitation which is posited by its universal essence, for precisely this essence is only the result of its inner self-distinction, its activity"(4)? That critical criticism in the "fluid" sense "pursues its path irresistibly, victorious and confident of victory", when in dealing with a question it first asserts that it has revealed its "true and general significance" and then admits that it "had neither the will nor the right to go beyond criticism", and finally admits that "it had still to take one step but that step was impossible because — it was impossible" (Die heilige Familie, p. 184(5))? That from the "fluid" point of view "the future is still the work" of criticism, although "fate may decide as it will"(6)? That from the fluid point of view criticism achieved nothing superhuman when it "came into contradiction with its true elements—a contradiction which had already found its solution in these same elements"[6]?
The authors of Die heilige Familie have indeed committed the frivolity of conceiving these and hundreds of other statements as statements expressing firm, "crystalline" nonsense—but the synoptic gospels should be read in a "fluid" way, i.e., according to the sense of their authors, and on no account in a "crystalline" way, i.e., according to their actual nonsense, in order to arrive at true faith and to admire the harmony of the critical household.
"Engels and Marx, therefore, know only the criticism of the Literatur-Zeitung" (7)
—a deliberate lie, proving how "fluidly" our saint has read a book in which his latest works are depicted merely as the culmination of all the "work he has done". But the church father lacked the calm to read in a crystalline way, for he fears his opponents as rivals who contest his canonisation and "want to deprive him of his sanctity, in order to make themselves sanctified".
Let us, incidentally, note the fact that, according to Saint Bruno's present statement, his Literatur-Zeitung by no means aimed at founding "social society" or at "representing, as it were, the last tear of grief" shed by German ideology, nor did it aim at putting mind in the sharpest opposition to the mass and developing critical criticism in all its purity, but only — at "depicting the liberalism and radicalism of 1842 and their echoes in their half-heartedness and phrase-mon-gering", hence at combating the "echoes" of what has long disappeared. Tant de bruit pour une omelette!* Incidentally, it is just here that the conception of history peculiar to German theory is again shown in its "purest" light. The year 1842 is held to be the period of the greatest brilliance of German liberalism, because at that time philosophy took part in politics. Liberalism vanishes for the critic with the cessation of the Deutsche Jahrbücher and the Rheinische Zeitung, the organs of liberal and radical theory. After that, apparently, there remain only the "echoes"—whereas in actual fact only now, when the German bourgeoisie feels a real need for political power, a need produced by economic relations, and is striving to satisfy it, has liberalism in Germany an actual existence and thereby the chance of some success.
Saint Bruno's profound distress over Die heilige Familie did not allow him to criticise this work "out of himself, through himself and with himself". To be able to master his pain he had first to obtain the work in a "fluid" form. He found this fluid form in a confused review, teeming with misunderstandings, in the Westphälische Dampßoot, May issue, pp. 206-14.b All his quotations are taken from passages quoted in the Westphälische Dampfboot and he quotes nothing that is not quoted there.
The language of the saintly critic is likewise determined by the language of the Westphalian critic. In the first place, all the statements from the Foreword which are quoted by the Westphalian (Dampßoot, p. 206) are transferred to the Wigand'sche Vierteljahrsschrift (pp. 140, 141). This transference forms the chief part of Bauer's criticism, according to the old principle already recom-mended by Hegel:
"To trust common sense and, moreover, in order to keep up with the times and advance with philosophy, to read reviews of philosophical works, perhaps even their prefaces and introductory paragraphs; for the latter give the general principles on which everything turns, while the former give, along with the historical information, also an appraisal which, because it is an appraisal, even goes beyond that which is appraised. This beaten track can be followed in one's dressing-gown; but the elevated feeling of the eternal, the sacred, the infinite, pursues its oath in the vestments of a high priest, a path" which, as we have seen, Saint Bruno also knows how to "pursue" while "striking down" (Hegel, Phänomenologie, p. 54).
The Westphalian critic, after giving a few quotations from the • preface, continues: "Thus the preface itself leads to the battlefield of the book", etc. (p. 206).
The saintly critic, having transferred these quotations into the Wigand'sche Vierteljahrsschrift, makes a more subtle distinction and says:
"Such is the terrain and the enemy which Engels and Marx have created for battle." From the discussion of the critical proposition: "the worker creates nothing", the Westphalian critic gives only the summarising conclusion.
The saintly critic actually believes that this is all that was said about the proposition, copies out the Westphalian quotation on page 141 and rejoices at the discovery that only "assertions" have been put forward in opposition to criticism.
Of the examination of the critical outpourings about love, the Westphalian critic on page 209 first writes out the corpus delicti in part and then a few disconnected sentences from the refutation, which he desires to use as an authority for his nebulous, sickly-sweet sentimentality.
On pages 141-42 the saintly critic copies him out word for word, sentence by sentence, in the same order as his predecessor quotes.
The Westphalian critic exclaims over the corpse of Herr Julius Faucher: "Such is the fate of the beautiful on earth!"(8)
The saintly critic cannot finish his "hard work" without appropriating this exclamation to use irrelevantly on page 142.
The Westphalian critic on page 212 gives a would-be summary of the arguments which are aimed against Saint Bruno himself in Die
heilige Familie.
The saintly critic cheerfully and literally copies out all this stuff together with all the Westphalian exclamations. He has not the slightest idea that nowhere in the whole of this polemic discourse does anyone reproach him for "transforming the problem of political emancipation into that of human emancipation", for "wanting to kill the Jews", for "transforming the Jews into theologians", lor "transforming Hegel into Herr Hinrichs", etc. Credulously, the saintly critic repeats the Westphalian critic's allegation that in Die
heilige Familie Marx volunteers to provide some sort of little scholastic treatise "in reply to Bauer's silly self-apotheosis''. Yet the words "silly self-apotheosis", which Saint Bruno gives as a quotation, are nowhere to be found in the whole of Die heilige Familie, but they do occur with the Westphalian critic. Nor is the little treatise offered as a reply to the "self-apology" of criticism on pages 150-63 of Die heilige Familie, but only in the following section on page 165,(9) in connection with the world-historic question: "Why did Herr Bauer have to engage in politics?"
Finally on page 143 Saint Bruno presents Marx as an "amusing comedian", here again following his Westphalian model, who resolved the "world-historic drama of critical criticism", on page 213, into a "most amusing comedy".
Thus one sees how the opponents of critical criticism "dare and can" "know how the critic has worked, and still works"I
Endnotes
[44] An allusion to the conflict between the Young Hegelian Karl Nauwerck and the professors of the Faculty of Philosophy at Berlin University (see Chapter III of The Holy Family, the present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 17-18).
[6] The review was published anonymously under the heading "Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Br. Bauer und Consorten. Von F. Engels und K. Marx, Frankfurt, 1845".