9. Eternal Truths

Wellred

Core Argument

In this chapter, Engels systematically dismantles Herr Dühring’s claim that moral principles are “permanent,” “simple elements” standing “above history” and national differences, and that “genuine truths” are “absolutely immutable.” Dühring dismisses any doubt of these principles as a “diseased condition of weakness” and “worse than pure nihilism.” Engels counters by grounding the question of truth in a materialist and dialectical framework. Human thought, he argues, is sovereign only as the total thought of all past, present, and future individuals, but is realised through a series of limited, unsovereign thinkers. This contradiction is resolvable only through infinite progress across endless generations. Consequently, eternal truths are exceedingly rare. In the exact sciences, even established results are subject to revision; in biology, discoveries such as the cell force wholesale revision of former truths; and in the historical sciences—studying human society, law, and government—knowledge is essentially relative and transitory, limited to particular epochs and peoples. Those who claim eternal truths in this sphere produce only platitudes.

Engels then turns to morality itself. The opposition of good and evil belongs exclusively to the historical domain of morals, where final truths are sparsest, as conceptions of good and evil have varied contradictorily between nations and ages. He dismisses the objection that without fixed moral distinctions morality ends as simplistic. Today, three moralities coexist: Christian-feudal, modern-bourgeois, and proletarian. None is absolutely final, but the proletarian morality contains the maximum elements promising permanence because it represents the future. The conclusion is that men derive ethical ideas from the economic relations of production and exchange based on their class position. Common elements among moral theories arise from shared historical background and similar economic stages; even “Thou shalt not steal” is not eternal, becoming laughable in a society without motives for theft. All moral theories are the product of economic conditions; morality has always been class morality. A truly human morality above class antagonisms is only possible in a classless society that has forgotten them. Dühring’s claim to impose an eternal morality on the future classless society from the midst of the old class society is therefore presumptuous. Engels concludes by ridiculing Dühring’s revelation that evil is the cat, a fittingly absurd capstone to a system that mistakes bourgeois prejudice for eternal truth.