11. Freedom and Necessity¶
Core Argument¶
Engels dismantles Herr Dühring’s pretensions to exhaustive legal expertise, revealing them as hollow. Dühring’s critique of private law merely asserts that jurisprudence is underdeveloped and that positive civil law sanctions force-based property. His knowledge is confined to Prussian law, as demonstrated by his ignorance of French law: he falsely claims Lassalle was prosecuted for “inciting” a crime, a category unknown to the French Code pénal, and that French procedure allowed a “half acquittal” for lack of evidence, which it does not. He is also unaware that English common law has required unanimous jury verdicts since the fourteenth century, not majority decisions. His complaints about legal confusion, anonymous collective decisions, and compulsory religious practices apply only to Prussia. Dühring’s “philosophy of reality” has as its horizon the six eastern provinces of old Prussia.
On freedom, Dühring gives two contradictory definitions: first, freedom as a diagonal resultant between rational judgment and irrational impulses; second, freedom as susceptibility to conscious motives operating with natural-law inevitability. This is a vulgarisation of Hegel, who correctly defined freedom as insight into necessity. Freedom consists in control over ourselves and external nature, founded on knowledge of natural necessity, and is a product of historical development.
Engels then attacks Dühring’s “law of difference” as a banal physiological commonplace—that continued stimulation of the same nerve fatigues it, requiring interruption and variety—dressed up in mystifying jargon. Dühring translates this known fact into “the deeper essence of all sensation rests on the difference between states,” then elevates it to “our law of difference,” claiming it makes a series of phenomena “absolutely explicable.” Engels counters that these phenomena are merely illustrations of the pleasantness of variety, needing no explanation even for the most ordinary understanding, and gain no clarity from Dühring’s alleged law. Dühring further applies the law to life stages and the lack of attraction in repetition. Engels dismisses the resulting “practical rules of life”—about maintaining total interest by allowing elementary interests to succeed each other according to natural periods, avoiding gaps devoid of interest, and preserving natural rhythm—as solemn oracles of philistine pedantry subtilising over shallow platitudes. He notes that following such rules would leave no time to enjoy pleasures, only to prepare them. Engels concludes by noting Dühring’s prohibitions on tobacco and disgusting foods, while his own praise of distilling suggests only wine and beer are banned, leaving him at the level of “pure childishness.”